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 […]

Mark Thoma expresses his exasperation with the tax cut slogans of lawyers and journalists: The disappointing part is that the press still lets them get away with this. At best, the press generally says something like “some economists claim this isn’t true,” implying there’s a debate about this issue — that some credible economists think […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care: Reinhardt thinks about (health) accounting Uwe Reinhardt (Princeton) is one of the world’s preeminent health care economists. In a NYT piece he makes an interesting attempt to define a new “health care accounting.” ( and see his earlier pieces mentioned in the article) Reinhardt explains and critiques the […]

Robert Waldmann Paul Krugman October 23 This isn’t original, although I don’t know who deserves the credit. So, here it is: in effect, QE2 amounts to a decision by the US government to shorten the maturity of its outstanding debt, paying off long-term bonds while borrowing short-term. [skip] It’s just as if Treasury sold 3-month […]

Robert Waldmann Nate Silver, like essentially all election handycappers, ignores internal polls — polls financed by one of the candidates or by the party of one of the candidates. Unusally, he explained why noting that even if the polls are unbiased there is extreme publication bias as campaigns release the polls if and only if […]

by Linda Beale Democrats touting tax cuts crossposted with Ataxingmatter The New York Times ran a story this week about the Obama tax cuts–the point? while the Tea Partiers rage against the Obama administration because they want more tax cuts, they have missed the fact of substantial tax cuts under the Obama administration. See Michael […]

I present an update on aggregate demand using the highest frequency of economic data available, US Treasury tax receipts. Tax receipts serve as a proxy for nominal aggregate demand via a nominal indicator of private payroll growth. US daily Treasury tax receipts are improving. (This chart has been modified since its original posting to enable […]