Simon Johnson comments on Standard and Poor’s irrational ratings: Standard & Poor’s downgrade of United States government debt last month has been much debated, but not enough attention has been devoted to the fact, reported last week by Bloomberg News, that it continues to rate securities based on subprime mortgages as AAA. In short, S.&P. […]

With all of the problems I have been having with my internet connection I may have missed it, but the revisions to second quarter productivity did not seem to have been covered very well. But nonfarm productivity growth is slowing sharply. It was actually negative in the first and second quarter —0.6% and -0.7% in […]

A note from Firedoglake is relevent for the Super Committee today as a bid to keep the meetings less secret. Call or write committee chairs for more open meetings.: Senator Patty Murray: (202) 224-2621 Representative Jeb Hensarling: (202) 225-3484 Sample Script: Hello, my name is ________ and I am calling to ask that [SENATOR MURRAY […]

by Mike Kimel The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 5: 1968 – 1988This post is the fourth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 […]

Reuters provides a synopsis of a report by the OECD on tax-avoidance strategies by multinational corporations: 30/08/2011 – Due to the recent financial and economic crisis, global corporate losses have increased significantly. Numbers at stake are vast, with loss carry-forwards as high as 25% of GDP in some countries. Though most of these claims are […]

I don’t understand my fellow US citizens. Many commenters will note that they told me that I didn’t since I don’t live in the USA, but I didn’t when I lived there. After the jump I try and fail to make sense of the latest NBC/WSJ poll. The nickel summary is that I thought that […]

One advantage the electronic subscribers have over us print people when dealing with The World’s Worst Newspaper Website(TM) is that if they forget to download a holiday (read:not printed in the US) issue, they can access the phosphors without having to deal with The World’s Worst Newspaper Website. Anyone have a PDF of yesterday’s FT […]

The standard model of Economic Development is Romer’s (1989, JPE 1990) adaptation* of Solow’s (1956, 1957) Model.  Basically, became Y = AKα(HL)(1-α) where the H stands for “human capital,” which multiplies the ability of labor. (Think high-skills labor—construction work, plumbing, teaching—where the worker continually “learns by doing” [op cit., Arrow, 1962]. The additional “human capital” […]

by Mike Kimel This post is the fourth in a series that looks at the relationship between real economic growth and the top individual marginal tax rate. The first looked at the period from 1901 to 1928, the second from 1929 to 1940, the third from 1940 to 1950. This week we look at 1950 […]

Bill McBride offers a look at the employment/population ratios by age at Calculated Risk, also offered at Mark Thoma’s Economist View: There will probably be some “bounce back” for both men and women (some of the recent decline is probably cyclical), but the long term trend for men is down. And several updates in graph […]