William Buckley says It Didn’t Work: One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what […]
Bill Polley responds to my critique of Michael Darda: China made a decision over a decade ago to fix its currency to the dollar. This was before the massive explosion of growth and before the Asian financial crisis. They have managed one of the most successful hard pegs in the region, and it probably saved […]
There is wee bit in Michael Darda’s latest that I might agree with – but given the following, I have two questions for him and the rest of NRO Financial: If Congress doesn’t act to extend the 2003 tax cuts, tax rates on capital will rise, which would depress after-tax rates of return to capital […]
Arnold Kling writes: If the oil company executives want to put money on their “working assumption of $15-$30 per barrel,” then they should go short in the futures market. But if their goal is to maximize shareholder wealth, then they should make long-term investment planning decisions based on the futures price of about $60 a […]
Yesterday’s CPI release showed that inflation continues to gallop ahead at a rather high rate, though once again, most of the rise was attributable to higher energy prices. Marketwatch offers this assessment: WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — U.S. consumer prices increased a larger-than-expected 0.7% in January, led by higher energy, food and housing costs, the Labor Department […]
Jerry Bowyer has finally written something that makes a little sense: This debate has been going on for more than a year between supply-siders — the gold-first crowd on one side, the bond-market/interest-rate/gold-also crowd on the other. Meanwhile, each month the consumer price index comes out with a relatively low reading. If the accuracy of […]
Michael Mandel and I agree on at least one thing – R&D is an investment: The factory is a long-lived investment which provides returns not just this year, but years into the future. That’s why Intel’s investment gets added into GDP, separate from the value of today’s production of microprocessors. Similarly, R&D is a long-lived […]
Jonah Goldberg over at The Corner opens with: Warrantless searches, Katrina fingerpointing, $7.8 trillion budget, Abramoff spin: these were the stories buffetting the White House last week. Table 3.2 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports the Federal spending for 2005 was less than $2.55 trillion. Does Jonah expect this Republican government to triple Federal […]
AB reader Fred C. Dobbs directs us to the Economic Assumptions chapter for the President’s budget. Starting on page 171, we see: When the economy is operating below potential, the unemployment rate exceeds the long-run sustainable average consistent with price stability. As a result, receipts are lower than they would be if resources were more […]
Kash noted the endorsement of the Division of Dynamic Analysis from Bruce Bartlett which had me dusting off my copy of the General Theory as I read this from Bruce: The great recession of 1973-75 was a severe blow to Keynesian economics because inflation was high while at the same time there was significant unused […]