If you are looking to sell a used Prius, the rise in gasoline prices is good news: NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Demand for the gas-electric hybrid Prius is so great that some used Priuses are selling for more than the list price for a new one, a report said on Monday. Buyers who want to […]
First, the good news: Oil futures (West Texas Intermediate:WTI) for May delivery are only $52.95 per barrel, off from the recent high of $58.28 per barrel. And it appears gas prices may be peaking for the current driving season at around $2.30 per gallon. Perhaps that will be the end of stories like the following […]
My imagination runs amok while wondering how China’s New Weapon could prove useful to China… China to the US: “We regret to tell you that we have been disappointed about your decision regarding issue X. (Selling new arms to Taiwan? Supporting a Taiwanese declaration of independence? Increasing pressure on N. Korea beyond what China wants? […]
The NYTimes ran a story yesterday about the potential dangers that the Chinese Navy’s rapid buildup may pose to the US. But China’s increasing military power may well be less important than another weapon that China has acquired over the past few years: substantial control over the fate of the US economy. Consider that China’s […]
Blogger Timothy tries to blame Arthur Andersen for the following: And I thought I’d further demonstrate this with a fictional balance sheet I made in Excel. Let’s suppose I have a business called Money Corp LTD, and that I start off with $1,000 … Gee, I think to myself, what a shrewd investor I am, […]
Kash addressed below the premise of whether higher oil prices will lead to a U.S. recession. As I was grabbing the car keys, Kathleen Hayes said something about how oil prices dramatically dropped so I wondered two things: (1) could this Kudlow forecast be sensible; and (2) might my $20 buy more than 8 gallons […]
Over the past week or so I’ve been thinking about the merits of the two competing scenarios that I spun out for you last week: the soft landing versus the hard landing for the US’s CA imbalance. After playing around with some simple spreadsheet models of the US’s national accounts, here are some of my […]
I found this story in yesterday’s WSJ rather amusing. The point of the story is summarized in the following table: What conclusions do I draw from this? First, economists often do no better than anyone else when it comes to predicting the impact of exogenous events on the economy. Second, most economists are pretty good […]
Now that Brad DeLong shows us that Donald Luskin is inconsistent, let’s provide Luskin with a few relevant samples of “junk science”. My favorite quick reference for financial economics is the webpage of Aswath Damodaran. Under Research and Papers is his working paper entitled Estimating Risk Premiums, which uses the same Gordon growth model that […]
Tyler reads Brad DeLong and writes: When can deficit spending in a recession help? 1. When it is part of a stable and sustainable structure of economic policy, so that nobody fears that it is the beginning of a process of rampant inflation or expropriation. In that case deficit spending will have no deleterious effects […]