March industrial production only rose 0.1%. But this is a very misleading headline asmanufacturing output rose 0.9%. The difference was a 6.4% drop in output of utilities.The decline in utilities largely reflects the March rise in temperatures and fall in heating days as the weather returned to normal after the severe snow storms of February. […]
Capitalists sure seem to prefer Obama to Bush.
by cactus The 1920s Depression: Glenn Beck, Thomas Woods, and “Benefits” of Cutting Taxes to Combat a Recession, Part 1 So I get an e-mail from reader Dean Moriarty, stating: Yesterday, I found myself in the sad position of inadvertantly listening to the Glenn Beck show. He was talking to some caller about how American […]
Robert Waldmann A year and a half ago I speculated as to how Lehman had managed to get it’s unsecured debt to be worth only 12 cents on the dollar. With my tinfoil hat firmly on, I wondered if they had written CDS on themselves. I may just be demonstrating my ignorance of the law […]
Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma posit that a falling US public deficit is bad news – they are right! Deficit hysteria is now mainstream thinking, while the more appropriate hysteria should be “jobs hysteria”. How in the world is nominal income growth expected to finance a drop in consumer debt leverage if the government supports […]
The battle over credit and debit card “swipe fees” that has been raging on Capitol Hill for the past 5 years will be heating up again soon. The credit card industry makes $125 million a day in swipe fees, so it is obvious why they are fighting to protect this “secret tax” on consumers and […]
This alone was worth the trip! Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the FSA
Robert Waldmann Is Jim Puzzangera of the Los Angeles Times insinuating what I think he’s insinuating ? Before Washington Mutual collapsed … its executives knowingly created “a mortgage time bomb” by steering borrowers to subprime mortgages and turning the loans into securities the company knew were likely to go bad…“At times, WaMu selected and securitized […]
by Marshall Auerback, Fellow and Contributor to the Roosevelt Institute’s New Deal 2.0 Marshall Auerback warns that Germany’s obsession with a defense against the external threat of inflation is blinding them to the real risks facing Europe. The Maginot Line, named after French Minister of Defense André Maginot, was a line of defenses which France […]
Lifted from comments. Vtcodger summarizes his thoughts on a layman’s approach to trade and trade policy: 1. It’s pretty clear that there is no protocol for determining if a currency is under or over valued relative to another or by how much. It’s all guesswork. 2. Foreign Exchange probably is not a marketplace that is […]