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 […]
Kudlow’s latest is entitled Evidence, Evidence, and More Evidence. Yet, he fails to link to or even mention the title of a single study preferring to write: Before making her strange assertions, Bernasek should have referenced the work of Harvard economists Martin Feldstein and Greg Mankiw, along with numerous articles published by the National Bureau […]
Bruce’s latest is praised by Ezra Klein, gets a mixed reaction from Kevin Drum, but is critiqued by Duncan Black. While we should praise conservative Republicans, such as Bruce and Bill Thomas, who admit that we need to recognize the deferred tax bills that President Bush is imposing on us, one reason to oppose the […]
While I’m not a big Greenspan fan, he is exactly right to draw attention to the two gorillas hiding in the closet of nightmares for the US economy: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on Wednesday told Congress to curb the rapid growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cut the risks […]
PGL and others have addressed many of the important points of contention in the debate between Mankiw and Baker-DeLong-Krugman (henceforth BDK, or simply The Trio) on the returns that privatized Social Security accounts could be expected to enjoy, so I have relatively little to add. But for those who are new to the whole discussion, […]
… Josh Marshall asks one: For two decades your Social Security payroll taxes have been used to offset the cost of upper-income tax cuts. If I’m not mistaken that money has been used at the highest rate (i.e., in absolute dollars terms per year) under this President Bush. The money is supposed to be paid […]
As a dog owner, I love Andrew’s title. While I appreciate the mention, I’d caution Andrew to read where I have parted company: At one point, I had mused that perhaps Andrew had a point here. But there’s a small problem with this line of reasoning – in particular my numerical example. The price-earnings ratio […]