Via Alternet: The list of Democrats who are entering these negotiations embracing the GOP’s terms continues. There are at least nine in the Senate. California’s Dianne Feinstein, Montana’s Max Baucus, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Delaware’s Chris Coons and Tom Carper, and Colorado’s Michael Bennett have all said they support cuts to entitlements in letters to […]
Brad DeLong reviews Alan Greenspan’s new book: Alan Greenspan: The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting: The true size of the American subprime problem was hidden for years by the defective bookkeeping of the GSEs…. Not until the summer of 2007 did the full magnitude of the subprime problem […]
Is there a case for raising interest rates by the Fed? Even a weird one? In the previous post, I explained the reasoning behind the current lower level of real GDP. The explanation is that real GDP declines to an equilibrium with the low interest rate in the money market for labor income. So if […]
by Mike Kimel The Efficient Racing Hypothesis Professor Sporkweather Mo of Fridgewater University has famously postulated that a driver cannot consistently achieve better than average finishes on a recklessness-adjusted basis, provided that all drivers have the same information on track and weather conditions at the start of a race. Using decades of data on drivers […]
Via the Real News is Bill Black on the JP Morgan setttlement: DESVARIEUX: Okay. And because of these massive losses, now JPMorgan has to pay this $13 billion settlement. But it’s really being reported as this big step toward bringing the banks to justice for their role in the financial crisis. Do you actually agree […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Don’t Blame the Techies! The early phases of the exchange sign up have been an unqualified disaster. It must be the techies, right? Not necessarily. The program design is wildly complicated, with the exchange system trying to do a start-to-finish on a very complicated transaction and pinging […]
I wrote in February of 2012 about welfare: Welfare, I’m not hurting from it and neither are you. I noted the following: but it looks to me like what we spend on welfare is not much more than what the government is spending on just doing the government thingy, unless of course people can’t get […]
The Eurozone experiment in austerity continues to fail as the peripheral countries endure ongoing cuts. Following up on my post of August 15, it’s time to look at the most recent Irish immigration data to update it through April 2013 (Ireland records population data from May 1 to April 30) and see how it affects […]
Real GDP has dropped to a new level. Many economists think it will return to its previous trend before the crisis. I made this video to explain how real GDP can drop to a new level as a result of labor share of income dropping after the crisis. Capital income rose after the crisis, […]