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

Risk is Mispriced Because Money Managers Face no Risk

Here’s what risk looks like: Having to tell your six-year-old son that you don’t have a birthday present for him because you didn’t have any money left after buying food for the week. Telling your daughter she has to attend the semi-shitty local community college instead of the awesome out-of-state school where she was accepted […]

An Organization That Provides Food Stamps for Pet Food

Two weeks ago, Linda posted a terrific, detailed post on the Camp hearings in the House Ways and Means Committee–which is not known for kumbaya, despite the chairman’s surname–on the possibility of ending or curtailing the tax deduction for charitable donations.  The hearings apparently were surprisingly serious in tone and nature, from what I could […]

Dean Baker on Social Security and Obama

Via Truthout Dean Baker points to continuing insistent of President Obama to keep Social Security ‘on the table’. Dean Baker has a take on some numbers surrounding the politics and stories politicans offer: While most of the DC insiders probably don’t understand the chained CPI, everyone else should recognize that this technical fix amounts to […]

Private equity and real estate managers get a "costly and unjust [tax] perk"

by Linda Beale Private equity and real estate managers get a “costly and unjust [tax] perk” Through a process of Wall Street interpretation of the law and the “Wall Street Rule” (that says that the government tax administration will have great difficulty gainsaying an interpretation of the tax laws that lots of high-powered–read “wealthy”–Wall Street […]

More on the adaptive inflation expectations hypothesis

This post will be long, fairly wonky, and confused.  I am typing, because I just have  to stop playing with FRED and write something.   My claim is that expected inflation over the next 5 (and 10 and 20) years is very similar to actual inflation over the past year.  I think the data generally […]

Offer Woodward a Buyout, Mr. Graham. And This Time Force Him to Take It. [UPDATED]

In followup to this post of mine from earlier today, I want to point out Ezra Klein’s post from last night titled “On the sequester, the American people ‘moved the goalposts’.” It begins: I don’t agree with my colleague Bob Woodward, who says the Obama administration is “moving the goalposts” when they insist on a […]

Bob Woodward’s Seriously Stupid Conflation of “The Sequester” and “A Deal to REPLACE the Sequester”

Good lord.  So much ado about one high-profile journalist’s (deliberate or inadvertent; I can’t tell which) semantics ploy.   Stellar New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes, in a lengthy article on the provenance of the sequester, explains the controversy: As this weekend arrived, Republicans were circulating a column by [Bob] Woodward published online […]

One ring to rule them all…

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2008/01/some-legislators-saw-dilemma.html http://www.angrybearblog.com/2008/04/one-ring-to-rule-them-all.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/major-banks-aid-in-payday-loans-banned-by-states.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130224&adxnnlx=1361718393-6egGqNlj8mdptNYglLFLXQ