by Barkley Rosserlifted from Econospeak Deleterious Doodling About The Deficit: What Else Is New? Department In today’s Washington Post business section, Lori Montgomery has a big article on “A renewed focus on spending,” starting with how the GOP is making noises about cutting spending to cut the deficit without raising taxes, while not mentioning anything […]

How 720 became the new 680? article in the Washington Post drew the following reaction from Tom: Credit: A Vicious Spiralby Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Somehow over the years I became known as a bit of an expert in personal financial planning, I suppose the tax background plus getting dragged into senior financial planning (via […]

I doubt even the Internet’s self-appointed Chief Geithner Apologist will be foolish enough to stand by him after this piece of shite: Some people just don’t like movies with happy endings. How else to explain this week’s report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP)? Rather than […]

by Linda Beale UBS and other ? offshore bank accountscrossposted with Ataxingmatter The government’s dismissal of a criminal information against UBS filed in Florida– United States v. UBS AG, No. 09-600333-CR-COHN, Dismissal of Information, Oct 22, 2010– leaves the tax cognoscienti wondering what the next step in its fight against secret offshore bank accounts will […]

Lifted from comments at Economix on the distorted comparisons of public versus private wages: These BLS data have been frequently cited to support the claim that public sector workers are paid more than private sector workers. However, as described at a February 2009 conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the wage differentials […]

Candorvilleh/t Noni Mausa

The Japanese yen, the Eurozone euro, and the British pound have appreciated 16%, 14%, and 9%, against the USD, respectively, since their 2010 lows. Some say that the “US wins” since the Fed’s quantitative easing (QE2) will drive export growth via a weaker dollar. (Note that the Fed has not actually announced QE2, this is […]

This is actually good news, since everything else the Fed has done has been to benefit the insolvent large banks. Still, I didn’t expect my post of three days ago to be such a perfect “negative indicator” so soon.

by Mike Kimel There seems to be something inherent in human nature that leads to frequent predictions of the end of the world. Usually, those predictions turn out to be wrong and then require some form of backpedaling. As an example, folks who use(d) a statistical package called Shazam might remember the two quotes that […]