The only reasonable conclusion is that Greg Sargent should resign from the Washington Post  before it finishes destroying his brain. Give Sargent credit: he knows Mitt Romney is lying, and he calls him out on it, which—especially for the denizens of “Fox on 15th”—is as close to truth as you get outside of Sarah Kliff’s […]

Ah.  Well, now we know what Romney has in mind when he says that GM and Chrysler didn’t need federal bailout funds in late 2008 and early 2009 in order to undergo bankruptcy reorganization rather than be forced to liquidate, because there was private-equity funding available for that purpose.  Solamere Capital and its Rolodex of […]

Elizabeth Warren is running for the US Senate in Mass. and came by Casey’s Diner Monday at lunchtime, a stop among many.   Eventually the campaign will heat up as a lot of money is being raised, and the summer ends. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post interviewed Elizabeth Warren this Monday as well. Here […]

Brad DeLong points to an article by Gary Younge in The Guardian: A web of privilege supports this so-called meritocracy: Shortly after Mitt Romney’s failed 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination his son Tagg set up a private equity fund with the campaign’s top fundraiser. One of the first donors was his mum, Anne. Next […]

Via Naked Capitalism comes this youtube video from Jamie Galbraith on inequality and macroeconomics, a speech delivered at the INET talks in Berlin: Galbraith has marshaled a great deal of cross country data over time, and shows how changes in equality happened in a very large number of economies in parallel. He explains, persuasively, that the most […]

This is advertising, but not blatantly so, and is an informative infographic on the current status of our housing crisis. Will America Ever Recover From The Housing Crisis

First a recap: Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment was a groundbreaking look at whether political experts really are expert, as judged by their success at making predictions. His overall conclusion: they aren’t. But (lifted from a previous post): …among the experts, ”foxes” — those who in Nicholas Kristof’s words are “are more cautious, more centrist, […]

Last February, in the lead-up to the all-important Michigan primary, Romney wrote an op-ed piece in the Detroit News titled “U.S. autos bailout ‘was crony capitalism on a grand scale’.”  The dual purpose of the piece was to defend the recommendation he made in a November 18, 2008 op-ed article in the New York Times titled “Let […]

Stan Collender notes that, for the first time in four years, the U.S. Treasury reported a surplus in the month of April.  It isn’t just that there was a surplus in April of 2008, though.  If you look back through Aprils (data here), the last time that month showed a deficit is 1983—the April less […]

Peter Dorman at Econospeak brings us another reminder about policy decisions on the economy.  Reposted from Econospeak: The Main Point Macroeconomics is complicated and political economy is devilish, so it is easy to get lost in the details. From time to time, it’s good to come up for air—to remember what the fundamental issue is. […]