The “M3” measure of money is almost gone. At least, it’s probably almost gone. Its last publication is due to happen on March 23, which means that M3-related reporting requirements for financial firms end this week. However, there remains an outside chance that Congressional interference could yet scuttle the Fed’s plan to terminate the M3 […]

George Will has decided the former Senator John Edwards has an old paradigm of what causes poverty in America: Edwards has a 1930s paradigm of poverty: Poor people are like everyone else; they just lack goods and services (housing, transportation, training, etc.) that government knows how to deliver. Hence he calls for a higher minimum […]

I wanted to follow-up on a couple of aspects as to my post noting Dick Cheney hoping people would save more. First of all – one of our readers is now saying Bush and his allies never said that the Administration wanted to give people their money back so they could consume more. Yes – […]

The 10-year bond is yielding over 4.7% this morning. That’s the highest long-term interest rate anytime in the past year: Note: 10-year interest rate expressed in tenths of a percentage point, so “47” indicates 4.7%, etc. Interest rates were higher for a few weeks during May and June of 2004, but other than that one […]

The Washington Post gives us a nice reminder today: Meet the typical American family. It has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it […]

Brad DeLong shares his lecture notes on the equity premium: There is, somewhere, a marginal investor: somebody just about indifferent between stocks and bonds. If the expected return to stocks were a little higher, he or she would move more money to stocks. If the extra risk associated with holding stocks were a little lower, […]

As I was reading another gem from Brad Setser on the Dark Matter controversy (Brad links to a very nice paper by Carol Corrado, Charles Hutten, and Daniel Sichel that shows the investment/GDP ratio has declined even if one included investment in intangible capital), one of his readers points out an AP story where Dick […]

As I was reading the Economic Report of the President, I figured it was time to revisit the issue of gasoline prices and the role played by refinery margins. Our graph shows the retail price per gallon relative to the consumer price index (January 2006 = 1.00) from January 2000 – when the real gasoline […]

I know about legacy costs and all that, but could it be that news like this has something to do with the gradual shrinking of GM and Ford, and the steady growth of the Japanese auto brands? NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – Japanese carmakers — or, more specifically, Honda followed by Toyota and Subaru — took […]

The House Price Index was just released this morning with the data on house prices in the US for all of 2005. The press release discusses its results for the US as a whole, reporting that: Average U.S. home prices increased 12.95 percent from the fourth quarter of 2004 through the fourth quarter of 2005. […]