Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Sterilized intervention?

Paul Krugman at Economist’s View appears to be saying the TAF is a sterilized intervention by the Fed. He uses an analogy of twenty people (the financial markets) and one bad apple being saved in order to help the other 19. Our own save the rustbelt (missing now, sadly, due to work. So much for […]

Immunity for everyone

Associated Press carries this article at Yahoo news. The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future […]

Voxbaby unemployment figures

voxbaby has a complete explanation of this chart in trying to decipher numbers and the meaning of unemployment. (Hat tip to reader andrew)

PARTICIPATION RATGE

Cool it everybody. If you look at the historical data you will see that it is a very normal cyclical development for the participation rate to drop in the early stages of a recession. There is nothing funny oR out of line with the data.

Employment report

The February index of aggregate hours worked was 107.3 as compared to a 4th quarter average of 107.7. That implies that first quarter hours worked are falling at about a 1.5% annual rate. As a first approximation that implies that first quarter real GDP growth will be about the same. Of course this depends on […]

Non-borrowered reserves

Naked Capitalism has some thoughts and links regarding the negative non-borrowed reserves entering negative numbers. It is too long for me to post easily. Perhaps someone could summarize?

Clouds

Having installed a cloud widget on the left sidebar, contributors and guest posters should label their contributions from now on so the widget can keep the references updated. Past posts can be labeled at your convenience, such as social security, WTO, global warming, taxes, economists etc.

Capital Gains and Dividend Taxes

We keep hearing from the conservatives-libertarian that we need lower taxes on capital gains and dividends to encourage capital spending or investments. But when I look at the record of the impact of lower taxes on capital on investment I am hard pressed to see the benefits such lower taxes are suppose to deliver. The […]

Where DID the money go? Part 3

NEW YORK, Feb. 7 /PRNewswire/ — The Securities Law Firm of Klayman & Toskes, P.A. (“K&T”)(http://www.nasd-law.com) announced today that it continues to investigate sales of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) from Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) and UBS (NYSE: UBS) to institutional investors. These firms sold billions of dollars in CDOs to investors around the world. Some […]