The Washington Post carried a story on a Senate hearing on money laundering, one example being HSBC. The criticism was aimed at the OCC regulators who failed to pursue the issue.  Also notice the fuss is over a foreign bank. The U.S. affiliate of global banking giant HSBC was for years a haven for foreign […]

The Incidental Economist addresses election snippets that keep on going, just like in the movies.  Read the whole thing: Let’s try to stick to the real world when we talk about Medicaid, by Aaron Carroll: (Note: Paul Krugman cites here. Tyler Cowen responds here. I respond to Cowen’s response here.) Tyler Cowen had a piece […]

Rules requiring firms to restrict employment to their country of origin would be hideously inefficient if applied on a global basis, and they would be every bit as devastating to American employees of foreign firms as offshoring by American firms is to workers who lose their jobs here. (One might also ask where the borders […]

In response to this graphic in my reprised post from yesterday: Commenter rjs points us to this depressing Economist post — the government data source for this graphic has gone dark, part of the Obama administration’s cost-cutting measures. The real irony I discover, though, is to find right-wingers at The Heritage Foundation screaming about the […]

Mark Thoma notes the discrepancy between pretty much standard economics and what the popular discussion considers ‘economics’ : Not All Economists are to Blame, But Some Are  A defense of some, but not all economists: Why Some Economists Failed  I assert that some economists got things mostly right about the recession and what was needed to […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Employer Responses  The Urban Institute and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation published a paper (October 2011) about the potential responses of employers and employees. The paper tends to take an optimistic view on the responses of employers, although warning of possible short term thinking by some employers.  Now the […]

Via Alternet, Thomas Ferguson and Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen point us to the FEC deleting information on “dark” political contributions.  You need to go to the original to read the important details, especially on c(4) contributions.  The point that we rely on agency information to be reasonably accurate cannot be stressed enough. We have […]

Lost in the shuffle here is the question of what it is Romney is denying he’s responsible for. Stipulate that Romney somehow had nothing to do with running a company of which he was the CEO and sole shareholder. Does he think, in retrospect, that his subordinates did something wrong by offshoring jobs? Clearly he […]

by Run 75441“Second Verse, the Same as The First”The story never seems to change . . . When you say that the high income earners, the top 20 percent, pay 90 percent of the taxes, what should they pay, 99 percent? These are the people who have enough money to invest in businesses and to […]

I generally agree with Paul Krugman, so it is exiting that I am outraged by something he wrote (I’ve calmed down now). Paul Krugman says that scratchpads are useful. They are sloppy easy models which are not taken seriously. Or maybe which shouldn’t be taken seriously, but it’s not a big problem that many powerful […]