“Liquidity” is another magic word. I like it rather less than “friction.” In the debate on financial regulatory reform opponents of tight regulations use the word liquidity as a magic spell which, they hope, will make all inconvenient evidence and arguments go away (no links my claim is like saying the Sun emits light). The […]

by Linda Bealecrossposted at Ataxingmatter Carried Interest: prospects? At the ABA Tax Section meeting in Washington last weekend, there was surprisingly little talk about the carried interest proposal. Carried interest, for those who don’t work often in the partnership area, is the way that managers of real estate, hedge, and equity partnerships receive a generous […]

Congress Dailey reports on the call to ‘strip’ American citizens of legal rights (Miranda rights, but also indefinite detention? as suggested by Joe Lieberman) based on suspicion and ‘affiliations’. We have a ‘war on drugs’ and a ‘war on terrorism’. Both involve specific policies and specific agencies, not the aid of Captain America and Ironman […]

by Tom aka Rusty Self-defeating Regulations The Obama administration has made a major commitment to the installation and use of electronics in U.S. medical records. Obama sees electronic medical records (EMRs) linked into electronic health record (EHRs) networks as a major factor in controlling costs and improving quality in the U.S. health care system. The […]

by Steve Roth, asymptosisCross-posted at Asymptosis. Thanks to yeoman’s work by Larry Bartels, Mike Kimel, and a host of others, we’ve seen that over many decades, the American economy has performed far better, by almost any measure, under Democratic presidents. Larry Bartels’ key graph mapping income growth by quintile, 1948-2005 (from page 33 of Unequal […]

Robert Waldmann John Q. Policymaker is driving a minivan. Maynard Keynes is in the passenger seat, Ed Prescott and Robert Lucas are in the second row of seats and Eugene Fama and John Cochrane are in the back seats. John Q: We are heading for a cliff !Maynard: slam on the brakes. Prescott: I don’t […]

Robert Waldmann Isaac Newton inspired many people to try to be the Newton of various fields. Unfortunately many tried the shortcut of using the same words as Newton but changing their meanings. This meant that those words had high status, because of Newton, but nothing to do with Newton’s success in fitting facts. One such […]

Wind power actually brings electricity prices down! The Oil Drum’s Jerome a Paris writes: Bloomberg has a somewhat confusing article about the newest complaint about wind power, but the gist of it is that wind power is an issue for the industry because it brings their revenues down: After years of getting government incentives to […]

by Linda Bealecrossposted at Ataxingmatter Deficit Commmission working groups–tax group, but no practicing or academic tax lawyer One of the strange results of treatment of economists as central policymakers over the last four decades or so of the “Washington Consensus” and the dominance of Chicago School freshwater economists has been the distortion of policy making […]

by Linda Bealecrossposted at Ataxingmatter (Rdan…Linda is still in DC for briefings at Treasury so is not available at AB just now) Wall Street Lobbyists’ View of Financial System Reform [edited to add link 5/4/10 at 3:12 pm] The Washington Post has an interesting story on the bank lobby’s thinking about financial reform. Klein, Lobbyists […]