Lifted from the rjs newsletter: Young vs. old – Three of the top five symptoms searched for on Yahoo Mobile in January were early pregnancy, herpes and H.I.V. None of these symptoms showed up among the top searches on desktop computers, which are more likely to be used by older people. The most popular symptom […]

Via the Finance Addict comes a survey by American Banker regarding ideas of too big to fail Now here’s a snapshot of the survey results (as of 2:00am EST):So here’s my question: if banks, themselves, do not believe that Too Big to Fail is over then why should we?

Bill Moyers points us back to banks and fiduciary responsibilities: “You shouldn’t run a financial system on the expectation of government support. We’re supposed to be a free enterprise system,” Volcker tells Moyers. “The problem of course is once they get rescued, does that lead to the conclusion they’ll get rescued in the future?” From […]

I do’t want to be rude to anyone in particular, so I will just note that I have the impression that two people who should know better are willing to suggest that logically consistent models populated by rational optimizing agents have policy invariant implications, that is are not vulnerable to the Lucas critique. This is […]

As far as I can could tell, Simon Wren-Lewis has been convinced by Paul Krugman. He now proposes parallel reasearch projects one of which is to be focused on fitting the data. This is exactly what Krugman advocated. Update: clearly I couldn’t tell very far. In fact, as he has repeatedly written, Wren-Lewis always agreed […]

by Dale Coberly DAMNED LIARS AND SOCIAL SECURITY There are liars, damned liars, and “non partisan experts.” The non partisan experts are expert liars, “non partisan” because that’s the best lie of all. A damned liar need not be an expert, but he is usually pretty clever at mixing “true” facts, or at least “facts […]

“I’ve never seen a less optimistic time in my lifetime in this country and people wonder why,” the first-term Republican governor said at the Bush Institute Conference on Taxes and Economic Growth in New York City. “I think it’s really simple. It’s because government’s now telling them ‘stop dreaming, stop striving, we’ll take care of […]

by Mike Kimel From an article in the NY Times: Politicians sometimes say that lower tax rates lead to higher economic growth, which in turn leads to higher overall tax revenue. This may have been true in the early 1960s, when the top tax rate was 91 percent, but the top tax rate today is […]

I see that his blog Mankiw shows a chart of the employment population ratio to make a comment about the “so called recovery”. But he selected the start date of the chart so that you could not see that during the eight years of the Bush administration the employment-population fell from 63.0 to 60.3, a […]

by Michael Halasy Drug shortages and the mythical marketI read an interesting article by Gehrett in the January issue of JAMA. In response to the increased utilization of generic drugs (currently about 70% of drugs used in the US), a fact which should be applauded, we have seen a frightening increase in drug shortages. In […]