UPDATE: Greg Sargent (via Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed) notes that I am hardly alone in my concluding pargraph. The last even semi-useful part of health care “reform” (and that was of dubious value) is dead: The idea of letting people ages 55 to 64 buy into Medicare, announced just last week, had threatened to explode […]
Rahm Emanuel accidentally Tells the Truth and Shames the Devil: “We have to get them off the sidelines and get them to play a more active role in our economic recovery,” Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said on Sunday. “They play an essential role in helping the economy grow.” Gosh, the Administration […]
by cactus Comparing Presidents: Real GDP per capita Growth Rates and Changes in the Tax BurdenIn last week’s exciting episode I posted this graph: A few quick comments… this is actually a correction – I screwed up the graph the last time by not following the same convention with Nixon and Ford that I did […]
UPDATE: D-Squared chimes in, saying in less than 100 words what took me a couple of thousand (though with no quotes): After the “first hundred days” in the term of a new Democratic President comes the next stage; the almost impreceptible transition among his supporters from saying “of course, he’s been hampered by all sorts […]
Charlie Stross talks about liquidity: What we’ve just seen, hidden in the euphemism here, is a confession that drug cartels and other organized criminals have gone on a $352Bn asset-buying spree — and the banks and regulators, world-wide, turned a blind eye to this because the alternative was to allow the banks to collapse. And […]
Paul Samuelson, 94 mostly-glorious years. And if you think he wasn’t doing much recently, check out the two-part interview with Connor Clarke—The Atlantic‘s real economics expert—here and here.
Households in the US and the UK are members of the “most levered club”. But put their balance sheets side-by-side, and the outlook for the US economy looks a little brighter than that for the UK. Why? Both are dropping debt burden, but a qualitative analysis suggests that the UK household leverage (probably) should be […]
Most of time when I write something, I sign it. A piece in the first Great American Baseball Stat Book. The first three editions of a book called Interest Rate Trends and Comparisons put out by the bank at which I worked in the late 1980s.* Review pieces in various publications. A piece in Institutional […]
Robert Waldmann One of the puzzling aspects of the European debate over how to increase financial regulation after the crash was the idea that hedge funds should be regulated more. This is odd as they didn’t destabilize the system. I just assumed the Europeans can’t stand unregulated people making huge amounts of money. Now I […]
Economists View has a note on the evolving ideas of what ‘financial’ reform looks like in Congress. It looks like de novo is back, and it was Barney Frank who pulled it in the first place. (h/t run) it appears Rep Frank put de novo branch banking back into the House Bill (HR4173) which just […]