David Wessel of the Wall Street Journal is feeling bearish this morning: Every so often, economic forces and financial markets collide in ways that make for a tumultuous year — the stock market crash in 1987, the Asian financial crisis and bond-market paralysis in 1998, the bursting stock bubble in 2000. Suddenly, this year has […]
GDP growth in the first quarter of this year was just revised upward to a very robust 5.3%. Yet a lot of analysts are disappointed: WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The U.S. economy grew at a 5.3% annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday in its first revision of gross domestic product estimates. […]
Why does the National Review allow John Tamny to publish such utterly stupid comments: If a homeowner secures a loan that enables him or her to purchase more goods, by definition there is a lender who has foregone that same consumption. There’s no direct stimulus here, just a shift of money from one person to […]
Bruce Bartlett and Brad DeLong note that even the Washington Times is challenging the credibility of our Treasury Secretary: According to Mr. Snow’s own numbers, which Mr. Frank had to drag out of him, over the past 12 months average nominal wages, for production and nonsupervisory employees, who account for 80 percent of private-sector employment, […]
Mark Thoma shared with me in an email some very odd rant from Jan Larson: The third in a potentially never-ending “liberals are” generalization series focuses on how liberals are economically ignorant … Liberals don’t understand economics, but that doesn’t stop them from following a “liberal economic theory.” This theory is fallacious in its assumptions […]
Mark Thoma provides a working link to and comments on a 2004 paper by William A. Niskanen and Peter Van Doren: The first conclusion from these tests is that there was no significant effect on the relative level of federal spending … The more important conclusion, consistent with my prior estimate of this equation, is […]
Perhaps macroeconomic professors should assign the latest from Cesar Conda & Ernest S. Christian (C&C) as reading material with an attached essay question designed to let their students find the various flaws in the argument: The recipe for high GDP growth in the future is the same as it was in 2003-04, when the combination […]
Mark Thoma has started an interesting discussion beginning with a Q&A with Paul Krugman: Alan Gertler, Reno, Nev.: I’m a scientist, not an economist, so I’m fairly naive when it comes to what drives the economy. My question is this: Have the tax cuts stimulated the economy as claimed (which I don’t believe given the […]
That didn’t take long. When William Niskanen produced a regression that suggested years in which taxes were low also tended to be years in which spending was high, one had to expect that the National Review would have some comment: While Niskanen has accounted for the effects of the business cycle, he has not taken […]
Alan Greenspan makes an important point: NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan sent a message to Washington policymakers: Don’t think about naming him to another commission seeking to untie the Gordian knot of Social Security reform. …Greenspan warned that retirement health-care costs are more of a problem for the federal government than […]