by Rebecca Wilder On Angry Bear, Tom Bozzo authored The Rich *Are* Different, focusing on the makeup of earnings across US tax payer brackets. And Cactus authors Poverty and the Real Median Income, where he comments on the poverty share and median income across U.S. Presidencies. So here is where I chime in on a […]

Via (what else?) Alea’s Twitter feed, John Taylor defends himself against Ben Bernanke: “The evidence is overwhelming that those low interest rates were not only unusually low but they logically were a factor in the housing boom and therefore ultimately the bust,” Taylor, a Stanford University economist, said in an interview today in Atlanta. It’s […]

by Linda Beale Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism) links to an interesting post on “Economists for Firing Larry Summers” (I’ll call this EFLS). The author of the blog is a PhD student in economics, in a “top 30” department who is obviously fed up with much of current economic thought. He writes on “The Case for […]

Note: I planned to finish this here, but the post became far too long, and splits quite well.  What follows is applications of economic theory and background material on financial decisions. To be clear, I hate the phrase “casino capitalism.” It’s rather unfair to casinos, which know how to do risk management: make an offer […]

by cactus Poverty and the Real Median Income I want to take a break from my usual taxes and economic growth beat, and I figured why not look at poverty and income. Normally I’d pull the data from the Census site, but for some reason it was down when I went looking (that’s right, folks, […]

Edmund L. Andrews (most recently of the NYT and being pilloried by Megan McArdle for having the gall to marry a woman whose previous marriage ended in bankruptcy) has joined Andrew Samwick, Stan Collender, Pete Davis et al. over at Capital Gains and Games. His first post, “Hopes of a Chastened Capitalist” is here.

Pete Davis: Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson initially sold Congress in the fall of 2008 on emergency intervention to purchase “toxic assets,” but quickly reversed course in favor of direct capital injections. Those favored financial institutions revived more quickly than most thought possible and most of those injections have already been paid back. However, most of […]

So far the topical open threads have gathered great material. As Bruce mentioned and hoped, the partisan nature that accompanied certain posts was muted when readers could offer a  look at topics such as trade and entitlements without the intervening point of view of a particular post. Angry Bear will always offer attitude and links, but I […]

This is a follow up to an article I wrote earlier this week, Older workers working longer; labor-force participation falling. In response to the article, which highlights the BLS employment and labor-force participation projections for 2008-2018, 2slugbaits (a loyal AB commenter) presented the following point: The 2 industry sectors expected to have the largest employment […]