CalculatedRisk previewed the latest UCLA Anderson Forecast and Dr. Leamer is concerned that residential investment demand will decline – especially in California. Lawrence Kudlow suggests that Leamer and CalculatedRisk are “bubbleheads”. Kudlow gives a couple of interesting reasons for questioning forecasts of weak residential investment, but he also provides the following strange logic: Although year-to-date […]

This morning the US Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, offered his analysis of today’s high oil prices. Short version: don’t expect anything to change soon. WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said Wednesday it will take years to close the gap between increasing world oil consumption and the ability of oil producers to […]

Brooke Oberwetter’s critique of Wexler’s Social Security proposal wants us to believe that we can somehow avoid tax increases. But then there is this: He has proposed the largest marginal tax increase this country has seen in decades: a 6 percent tax hike on all income over the current $90,000 payroll tax cap. Let us […]

The price of oil is at around $60 per barrel for the second day in a row today. Note that this is this highest price for crude oil in real terms since the end of 1982. Naturally, this means that the value of US oil imports will continue to grow from their already high levels. […]

Southern California is known for its freeways, which are often jammed with traffic. Amy Argetsinger and Steven Ginsberg report on our experiment with private toll roads. As I resident of LA who rarely even uses the public freeways, I did not even know these toll roads were privately owned. I also certainly did not know […]

Let me apologize for my hiatus last week; it was the result of a nasty virus that took me pretty much the entire week to recover from. At any rate, I find that my mood is not being improved by reading about the economic situation in Europe. And apparently I’m not alone in my disappointment. […]

It seems that Andrew Roth of the Club for Growth has an odd flair for the English language as he suggests that Bill Thomas is about to introduce a “MONSTER BILL”. Part of this bill seems to be the DeMint proposal to strip away the Social Security surplus, which will make the unified deficit as […]

The latest Harris Poll is out, courtesy of the WSJ (subscription): The poll also reports that in answer to the question, “How would you rate the job President George W. Bush is doing as president – excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?”, 45% responded with either “excellent” or “pretty good” while 55% answered negatively […]

The bubble discourse has reached record decibel levels this week as an unprecedented barrage of mainstream housing related articles hit the newsstands. Measured with internet searches for “real estate bubble” and “housing bubble”, bubble interest has soared: The market share of these terms across all major search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and […]

This op-ed is a collection of the worst arguments I’ve read on this issue. Comparing the woes of PBGC to whether we know how to reasonably forecast the future cash flows of the Social Security Trust Fund fails to grasp the moral hazard issues involves when companies fund private defined benefits plans. Flemming v. Nestor […]