The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, without whose FRED database and Excel Add-in Economics Bloggers (and Matt Yglesias) would be Even More Boring, has been running a series of Discussions explaining why the Fed is incompetent—er, Why They Don’t Follow Their Dual Mandate—er, well, something about how They’re Doing The Best They Can.* The […]

by Rebecca Wilder EA Balance of Payments: the Current Account I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the balance of payments flows within the Euro Area (EA). Given the complexity of the balance of payments, there are too many angles to tackle in one post. Therefore, spanning the next week I will dedicate […]

by Beverly Mann Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Strange Political Prediction—And Other Recent ACA-Litigation Events Well, as you all probably know by now, there have been two major developments in the courts within the last two weeks on the litigation challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the ACA, a.k.a., “Obamacare). On November […]

by run 75441 In response to Newt Gingrich’s comments on failing schools, work, and rising bootstraps, Peter Dorman at Econospeak replies in: Education with a Twist—An Oliver Twist” “why take it out on the janitors? If the school was failing it wasn’t their fault. According to Gingrich, it’s the teachers who can’t make the grade. […]

by Mike Kimel Bank of America, Kafka, and I – A Continuing Relationship A year and a half ago I wrote a post about how Countrywide, by then a division of Bank of America, had filed to foreclose on our home, apparently on the basis that someone with a similar name to the previous owner […]

op ed by run75441 Think Progress offers a look at relevant parts of the ‘jobs bill’. In the US, the winds of Washington Politics don’t blow, they suck. Gerrymandering the Jobs Bill: “The piece of the jobs bill Republicans will pass would end a requirement that the government withhold three percent of the cost of […]

All You Need to Know about Newt The Gingrich health center’s support for such a mandate was part of an “Insure All Americans” plan that appears to have disappeared from the center’s Web site Thursday. See that there is nothing here http://www.healthtransformation.net/cs/insure_all_americans But it is still here Key quote Require that anyone who earns more […]

By Mike Kimel The Gold Index, April 1933 – February 1934, Courtesy of Scott Sumner I’ve been having a bit of a back and forth with Scott Sumner of The Money Illusion over the degree to which monetary policy, in particular the devaluation of the dollar, affected the economy in 1933. (My most recent post […]

Think Progress points us to a study by Citizens for Tax Justice on what industries receive tax subsidies by amount and percentage, with pages of how data was compiled at the end.