by Mike Kimel Cross posted at the Presimetrics blog. I guess when you’re a very not famous (co-)author like yours truly, people start contacting you with information about their books. I got an e-mail today from another currently very not famous author plugging his book, and I found it to be an interesting concept. The […]

by Beverly Mann Wealthy people hire people? I didn’t know that.Crossposted with the Annarborist “Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that. The truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can.”(here)—Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona and Economics Nobel Prize laureate Actually, of course, since Shadegg is right […]

LA Times (via John Chait). The projected cost of the $700-billion financial bailout fund — initially feared to be a huge hit to taxpayers — continues to drop, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimating Monday that losses would amount to just $25 billion. That’s a sharp drop from the CBO’s last estimate, in August, […]

Not certain this link will work, but at Interfluidity, SRW replies to Karl Smith, closing with a sentiment with which I am very much in sympathy: It is not technocratic economists who will win the day and pull us out of our cul-de-sac, but angry Irishmen and Spaniards who challenge, on moral terms, the right […]

I just want to remind everyone that the last president to implement a federal pay freeze was Nixon. And of course we all remember how that worked. Just after that was when I left government for about a 33% raise in total compensation — including fringe benefits and retirement. So much for over paid federal […]

by Peter Dorman The Impoverished, and Impoverishing, Debate about Fiscal Deficitsoriginally posted at Econospeak It is like living in a dream—a very bad dream. Everything seems at once real and imaginary, serious and deliriously impossible. The language is familiar and incomprehensible. And it seems there is no waking up, ever. I’m talking about the “debate” […]

by Mike Kimel Hauser’s Law is Extremely MisleadingCross posted at the Presimetrics blog. A friend sent me a link to this Wall Street Journal opinion piece by W. Kurt Hauser. Who is he, you ask? Here’s what it says at the bottom of the article: Mr. Hauser is chairman emeritus of the Hoover Institution at […]

Ezra Klein explains that Medicare can’t cut payments too much or doctors will opt out The problem is that Medicare can’t control costs too much better than private insurers or, as you see from the article above, doctors will simply abandon Medicare. Klein seems oddly indifferent to the detailed text of the Afordable Care Act. […]

Echoes of Japan, echoes of the Great Depression. One of the few economists who knows history closes a post by presenting the proper context for the choices: A quick exit [by Ireland, from the Euro] may still be better than a decade of slow, grinding deflation combined with Zombie banks and Zombie household balance sheets […]

Assume I believe in risk-adjusted return on capital. That is, I don’t buy a bond yielding 12% instead of one yielding 6% without first considering that the yield difference is affected by the likelihood of Principal return being lower. (But I will buy the 12% bond if I believe the risk premium is too high […]