Ken Houghton distracts us from the important things with an examination of monopoly power, asymmetric information, and perpetuating a bad business deal. By the time Gary Bettman got to Phoenix, his lawyer was lying to the court: “There are three things that it takes to be an owner of an NHL franchise. One, you’ve got […]

Robert Waldmann It appears that the worst tax ever TM is the brainchild of the normally sane Olympia Snowe. How could a sensible intelligent person come up with such a terrible idea ? What is wrong with the leaky bucket metaphor for the economics of redistribution ?What is the leaky bucket metaphor for the economics […]

by Rebecca Yesterday’s post on the Australian economy sparked some discussion of its housing market. I agree – Australia’s bubble is large relative to that in the US (interestingly enough) and Canada. The chart illustrates the price to rent ratio in Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, the UK, and the US, which measures the trade-off between […]

rdan Hat tip to juan for the link to the Wednesday SCOTUS blog for this: If supporters of federal curbs on political campaign spending by corporations were counting on Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., to hesitate to strike down such restrictions, they could take no comfort from the […]

Robert Waldmann The Federal Reserve, through its extensive network of consultants, visiting scholars, alumni and staff economists, so thoroughly dominates the field of economics that real criticism of the central bank has become a career liability for members of the profession, an investigation by the Huffington Post has found. [skip] at the Journal of Monetary […]

Robert Waldmann OK not really. Really I’m semi disagreeing with Steve Benen’s denunciation of Rep[rehensible] Wilson. The guy who shouted “you lie” when Obama said something true. He does seem to be a very special piece of work, but the consensus reality which he rejects is rather distorted on one particular topic — US arms […]

by Rebecca Australia is another on the short list of countries that “escaped recession” (another is Poland, which I wrote about earlier). As much of the developed world struggles with job loss and weak economic groundwork, Australia managed to push through the global meltdown with just one quarter of negative growth, -2.8% annualized growth in […]

rdan Calculated Risk reminds us: …U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum, through July. The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products. Import oil prices increased to $62.48 in July – up about 50% from the prices in […]

rdan Echo engineers for js-kit, our comments company, and I have revised our link to transfer Haloscan comments to Echo, and re-designed our link to Echo directly, so I can then manipulate the html to produce a comment section to our satisfaction. This includes re-writing parts of the template. The trouble with the comments in […]

rdan Here is a link to an MSNBC President Obama and healthcare video plus a CBS full transcript.