The Wall Street Journal about 20 years ago had a cartoon of a man explaining the value of the dollar to his son. The son replied that he wanted his allowance in Swiss Francs. I thought of this cartoon as I read the latest from Kevin Hassett on why privatization is so crucial. Hassett and […]
I have taken to calling the housing market a “bubble”. But how do I define a bubble? A bubble requires both overvaluation based on fundamentals and speculation. It is natural to focus on an asset’s fundamental value, but the real key for detecting a bubble is speculation – the topic of this post. Speculation tends […]
Let’s join William Polley in celebrating the life of Pope John Paul II. We might also mourn his death as we are assured he has now joined the Lord that he served so ably. But no liberal or conservative partisan hack should politicize this Pope – as George will did today when Will compared the […]
Angrybear readers have long enjoyed the comments from Elaine Supkis – so by “new gal”, I’m referring to her new blog: The Bush people plug in numbers hoping to fool people. They admit, if you corner them, their formulas will cause real economic pain…for the working class. They won’t admit that this will be a […]
While Brad provided an advanced copy, Dean and Paul presented their paper with Greg Mankiw providing his comments courtesy of Donald Luskin who for some reason thinks Mankiw devastated the paper by Baker-DeLong-Krugman (BDK). Max Sawicky provides another perspective on the Gunfight at the Brookings Corral as does Brad. Greg might have given a citation […]
Today’s employment report from the BLS was truly disappointing. Most economists had predicted reasonably strong employment growth, of at least 200,000. But it turns out that the US economy only generated half that number of new jobs in March. THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: MARCH 2005 Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 110,000 in March, and the […]
The Free-Lunch Supply-Side crowd seems to be playing Barbra Streisand’s Memories of late. For example, Greg Kaza traces Federal Reserve articles as far back as 1981 – each noting that incentives matter. Of course, mainstream economists have never doubted this proposition, but we also note that there is something called the law of scarcity, which […]
Will’s latest Washington Post oped: He would erase the federal income tax system – personal and corporate income taxes, the regressive payroll tax and self-employment tax, capital gains, gift and estate taxes, the alternative minimum tax, and the earned-income tax credit – and replace all that with a 23 percent national sales tax on personal […]
While Brad DeLong provides a nice summary of the debate through yesterday, Kash has been very busy this morning. I shared a question over at David Altig’s blog that simply queries what would Rip van Winkle think if he woke up from a nap that began in 1985. In 1985, the debate centered on the […]
The US’s abysmally low personal savings rate has to start rising at some point. There’s no getting around that fact. But we clearly have not yet reached that point. Today’s release of the February personal income and spending data from the BEA shows no inclination for US households to start saving more. Personal income increased […]