Quote by from San Francisco Chronicle via Reader Supported News on the Berkley OWS “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to […]

by Linda Beale GOP wants to repeal Dodd-Frank: instead they should listen to Nassim Taleb Nassim Taleb, the author of the book on long-tail events, suggests in a Nov. 6, 2011 op-ed in the New York Times that “it is only a matter of time before private risktaking leads to another giant bailout like the […]

by Dale Coberly SOCIAL SECURITY AIN’T BROKE A Reply to Linda Beale I want to take advantage of Linda Beale’s essay “Social Security: It Ain’t Broke Unless China is too” to make some points of my own. I want to be clear at the outset that I am grateful to Linda for her essay. She […]

by Linda Beale The right’s smoke and mirrors scam about Social Security–it ain’t broke (unless China is too) We’ve noted in these postings the growing inequality between rich and the rest of us in America, and that is the appropriate backdrop against which to investigate further the right’s smoke-and-mirrors scams about tax policy and earned […]

On this Armistice Veteran’s Day, let’s try to do a counterfactual and Make Brad DeLong Happy.* Let’s assume that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley—commonly referred to, incorrectly, as “the repeal of Glass_Steagall”—is A Good Thing. Well, I won’t go that far. An Inevitable Thing. [Many sentences about Larry Summers omitted here.] After all, anyone who was paying attention […]

A commenter at Steve Benen’s Washington Monthly blog was grousing (correctly, as spencer notes in comments) that Benen had allocated all of the 2009 change (read:drop) in private-sector jobs to Obama, while GWB was in office for the first 19.5 daysduring the time the employment data for January was gathered. Turns out that there were […]

I wanted to look at the WSJ job database, suspecting what I might find, but currently lack the bandwidth in a major way. Fortunately, Noah took some (more) time from his thesis (“distraction from productive activity”) and did the dirty work. Apparently, being a STEM undergraduate isn’t the path to Nirvana:* I went through the […]

By Rebecca Wilder European Policy Makers Don’t Understand But Markets Do So here we are: the Italian yield curve is flat at above 7%; the government institution is in question; and the ECB is using its SMP purchase program as a carrot to drive austerity implementation in and Berlusconi out. Some would argue that the […]

Brad DeLong has two posts, one from Ezra “I’m a liberal who is safe for the Washington Post” Klein and one from Mike “I actually looked at the data” Konczal. Brad deals with Ezra’s folly: I think a B+ is too high a grade–largely because one big task of 2009 was to set up the […]