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

Mark Cook & the Stock Market Divergence into the Twilight Zone

Mark Cook is an investor who uses his own proprietary indicator to assess the stock market. He saw the crashes of 1987, 2000 and 2007.  (article from WSJ Market Watch) He is seeing the stock market going into strange territory at the moment. “It’s like being in the Twilight Zone, he says. “Imagine going outside […]

Reading the 2014 Social Security Report: Released July 28

The Countdown is ON! (Update 2: It’s out, links work. See you in Comments) (Update for Post Publication) If things go as scheduled the 2014 Report of the Trustees of Social Security will be released to the web at 12:15 Easter or less than two hours from the time this post published. Assuming the same […]

Conservative-Legal-Movement Law Is Really Just a Kaleidoscope

After taking a nearly-month-long hiatus from blogging here about legal issues, and blogging only very lightly about other things, I posted this controversial post last Friday and participated in a lengthy comments thread.  The final comment of mine, in reference to some of the preceding comments of others and of mine, reads: A final point on this […]

The New Synthesis? Market Monetarists Meet New (and Post?) Keynesians on Helicopter Drops

A a year or so back I highlighted David Beckworth’s great post on Helicopter Drops. And the world’s best econoblogger, Steve Randy Waldman, did as well. (A “fantastic post,” he said.) I’ve been pinging ever since to see a response to that post from Market Monetarist opinion-leader Scott Sumner. (AS SRW said, what we’d gotten from him […]

Border Crisis: Fictions v. Facts (Part 2 of “Children from Central America”)

 by Maggie Mahar Despite extensive media coverage, there is probably much that you don’t know about the history of the border crisis—and what we can or should do in response. Too often the headlines are designed to stir passions, rather than inform. At the end of next week, Congress will leave for its five-week August […]

Blast from the past for Millienials

Big tobacco companies and the medical establishments: Today, Big Tobacco is chasing a new revenue stream: e-cigarettes. They appeal to 20-somethings-and the lack of health studies about the side effects give the old merchants of death an unhealthy horizon for false advertising and profits that come at a cost of misery. And lawsuits…but not for […]

So what about Detroit? (and water)

David Zetland has a post from last year at Aguanomics that should stir some thoughts in What about Detroit.  Still relevant. I have followed Detroit’s fall with interest, mostly because I am hoping that an entrepreneurial government will allow a thousand flowers to bloom in the hollowed-out city(population has dropped by 60 percent; 200,000 properties […]

GDP and beginners

Financial Times  Has GDP outgrown its use? By David Pilling has an excellent beginners article on the make up and use of GDP that poses questions: Simon Kuznets, the Belarusian-American economist often credited with inventing GDP in the 1930s, had severe reservations about the concept right from the start. Coyle told me, “He did a […]