Dan here…Paul Krugman New York Times Dec. 24 notes Robert’s thinking on current story lines by some economists in macromedia.  Other posts by Robert on the subject can be found here, here, here, and here.  Krugman writes:  Robert Waldmann is shocked, shocked, to find conservative economists not doing their homework: Even now, I am shocked that economists didn’t bother to […]

Guest Post by Mark Jamison, a retired Postmaster in North Carolina. The Rightwing echo chamber has gone nuts at the comments of Jonathon Gruber, comments that were, at the least insensitive and more than a little cynical. Gruber’s assertions that the American public was not very bright and had to be tricked into accepting Obamacare […]

http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-oil-choke-collar-2015-may-be-acid.html The Oil Choke Collar: 2015 may be the acid test – by New Deal democrat It’s nice to be proven right.  Even more, it’s nice to be proven right, for the right reason. Back in 2011, I described what I called the “Oil choke collar,” writing: For the second time in two years, Oil’s […]

Holiday present for you via Congress and the Cromnibus. Tucked into the massive spending bill Congress passed this weekend was legislation that reversed 40 years of federal law protecting retirees’ pensions.  The change will allow benefit cuts for up to 10 million workers, many of them part of a shrinking middle-class workforce in businesses such […]

Sandwichman at Econospeak “Accounting for the facts that healthy foods are otherwise less desirable and that consumers already have some information about health, the net benefit to consumers possible from consuming healthier foods is 30-40% of the value of the gross health benefit from switching to the healthiest possible diet.” What “facts”? A Reuters report […]

Have a warm holiday with friends and family. Be safe today and into the New Year . . .

If anyone means to deliberate successfully about anything, there is one thing he must do at the outset: he must know what it is he is deliberating about. Otherwise he is bound to go utterly astray. Now, most people fail to realize that they don’t know what this or that really is. Consequently when they […]

(Dan here update…other posts by Robert Waldmann on the issues can be found here, here, here, and here.) G and GDP during the current recovery update Stephen Williamson asks “Where’s the multiplier” (I have read only the title not the post). Since I regressed rates of growth on rates of growth, my coefficient of grGDP on grG = 0.339 […]

Noah Smith has an excellent post which is very critical of something John Cochrane wrote. I added a couple more criticisms in comments Your post is very good as usual. I’d add a couple of things. Cochrane wrote “With the 2013 sequester, Keynesians warned that reduced spending and the end of 99-week unemployment benefits would […]

This is getting out of hand. A recent post received too many high quality comments. I discuss the discussion some here. The general view expressed in the discussion is that it sure looks as if non residential fixed capital investment as a percent of GDP expressed (nrfinvgdp) and nominal interest rates are positively correlated, because […]