Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

California Pays Off Arnie’s $15 billion 2004 Loan from Wall Street

California Pays off $14 Billion in Costly Debt From 2004 Promoting the borrowing in Proposition 57 was one of Schwarzenegger’s first acts in office, and he pitched the measure as a way to avoid public service cuts and tax increases. The state had the lowest credit rating among all 50 states in the nation at […]

Not A DSGE Model

I will try again to answer Larry Summers’s question “”What wouldn’t be a Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium model?” I won’t present a formal macroeconomic model in a blog but will try to describe what I might do if I got down to work. I think the first step back to not DSGE starts with the simplest standard […]

What Wouldn’t be a Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium model?

In Which I Try to Answer a Question asked by Larry Summers as a Joke The LSE held a discussion on Reconstructing Macroeconomics. Brad DeLong posted a transcript , the video is here. Larry Summers opened with a joke Larry Summers: You know I was tempted to blast off at Dynamic-Stochastic General-Equilibrium models. That is, […]

RNC/Soccer League Debate: Relegation and Promotion

People who follow British Association Football (Soccer, Football, Footie) know that it consists of a number of tiered Leagues which have annual processes of relegation and promotion as the bottom performing teams move down a tier while the top performing ones in the lower tier move up. Play online and have the chance to win […]

The Challenges of the Greek Crisis

by Joseph Joyce The Challenges of the Greek Crisis The Greek crisis has abated, but not ended. Representatives of the “troika” of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund returned to Athens for talks with the Greek government about a new bailout. This pause allows an accounting of the many […]

Social Security Defender Archive: Including Northwest Plan Docs/Spreadsheets

I have been working off and on, well mostly off because of ‘life’ and ‘laziness’, since 2010 on a project I modestly called the Social Security Defender. It is all built around a Google account and so has a Google+ page, a blog, an e-mail address and a Google Drive. Today I am going live […]