Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Export Demand – Continued

OK, I make a comment over at Dan Drezner’s blog in line with my Sunday blog here and the “crowd” goes nuts. You see – they think I don’t realize that the dollar has devalued. a of the real exchange rate does have our real exchange rate down to 92.22 (1973 = 100) from 116.77 […]

Bush: Flip to Flop in Under Ten Days

The 9/11 Commission’s report was issued on July 23. As CBS MarketWatch reports, it took less than ten days for Bush to reverse his early skeptical position and, bowing before the polls, embrace the panel’s principal recommendations: WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) — President Bush said Monday he wants to overhaul the structure of the U.S. intelligence community […]

Slumping Exports

In Daniel Drezner’s latest discussion (Doha is Back on Track) on of international trade issues, he notes this Kerry press release, which states: Exports Are Down Under President Bush-The First President Since Herbert Hoover. Exports have fallen in inflation-adjusted terms under President Bush-the first drop under any President since Herbert Hoover. In contrast, most post-World […]

Lazy, Stupid Media Parrots

Brad DeLong explains the incentives of the press: When Joshua Bolten, George W. Bush’s budget director, tells New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum that: The New York Times: “the improved budget outlook [from last January’s forecast] is the direct result of the strong economic growth the president’s tax relief has fueled.” The natural follow-up question […]

Housekeeping

I’ve made a few changes that will, hopefully, slightly improve your reading experience: The archives are fixed (weeks after 5/14 had mysteriously stopped displaying). I’ve replaced the FreeFind search engine with Google’s search engine. However, due to the failure of the archives, search engines were not finding entries from after 5/14. As soon as Google […]

Silver Lining in the GDP Report

Someone get President Bush a copy of the latest GDP report as he is telling a Missouri audience about the alleged highest real GDP growth in 20 years. I guess he’s still talking about that temporary spike in the annualized rate for 2003QIII (which is no longer being reported as 8.2% but only 7.4%). For […]

Sitting Next to Mrs. Kerry

During the 1993 State of the Union, Alan Greenspan sat next to Mrs. Clinton.  A friend asked what does this imply?  We now know that the successful economic policies of President Clinton included fiscal restraint combined was easy money that has become known as Rubinomics.  But I give it away – yes, it was Robert […]

Pre-Presidential Succession

Addressing the question of what to do if the presidency changes hands and both the incoming president and vice-president are killed before choosing a cabinet, Eugene Volokh comments on an interesting suggestion from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex): Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, proposed an interesting Senate […]

Stock Options and Transfer Pricing

Part VII of George Mundstock’s US Taxation of Multinational Enterprise (July 28) suggests that the arm’s length standard for avoiding transfer pricing manipulation does not work. Maybe it’s the very high standards of discourse in his first sixth threads, but I found this argument a bit unconvincing. But I’d like to take this argument “To […]

B and S

Those are the letters Chris Mathews and Pat Buchanan need to understand in order to tell “Osama” from “Obama”; learning those same letters could also help them understand the very things they utter. Here’s Mathews, and no, I’m not making this up: MATHEWS: [Buchanan], … Would you rather have Obama or Osama as your key […]