Robert Waldmann “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of” [the universe] Note the placement of the close quotation mark and no peeking please. Adam Smith (1776) “The Wealth of Nations.” Book III Chapter 4.

Robert Waldmann Non-Standard Monetary Policy Robert Lucas on Non-Standard Monetary Policy 2008 A dead end? Not at all. The Fed can satisfy the demand for quality by using reserves — or “printing money” — to buy securities other than Treasury bills. This is the way the $600 billion got out into the private sector. This […]

Robert Waldmann The Kid has dropped his mask (he’s been hinting at this for years but … 95% !!!!) What if we had a 95 percent marginal tax rate on income over $10 million? What dire consequences would flow from this? Perhaps a certain outflow of top-flight baseball talent to Japan. But I don’t see […]

rdan Jeffrey Sachs at Huffington Post has a good take on Geithner and Summers as well.

by reader coberly SOCIAL SECURITY: RETURN ON INVESTMENT We often hear claims that the “rate of return on investment” of Social Security is less than what a person could realize by investing “in the market.” So much so that some authors claim that Social Security has created a “legacy debt” that amounts to a “backward […]

by reader Noni Mausa Title: Going into Shock Subhead: Some economic metaphors seem more appropriate than “tighten your belt.” Explaining economic realities and their likely solutions can be made a lot easier with the judicial use of well-understood metaphors. Unfortunately, these tools can be also Used for Evil, or at least Confusion. In times of […]

Reality (h/t Dr. Black): In certain ZIP codes in places like Homestead and Florida City, around 25 percent of the homes are in one stage of foreclosure or another. Countless others were built by developers and sit vacant in ghostly subdivisions, with not a buyer in sight. In the days after Andrew, then-Dade County Emergency […]

This is why we don’t believe the bailout will work the way you think it will (i.e., to increase lending): Recently, securities rated AAA have changed hands for roughly 30 cents on the dollar, and most of the buyers have been hedge funds acting opportunistically on a bet that prices will rise over time. However, […]

By Spencer The updated fourth quarter real GDP revisions really did not have much interesting information. But maybe the most important data was the release of fourth quarter profits, especially for financial corporations. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008 financial corporation profits fell from $370.3 billion to $122.4 billion, […]