by Bruce Webb Articles this week by Kevin Hassett and Lori Montgomery sought to make the claim that deficits scheduled for 2017 had been moved up to today as a reason to immediately convene a bi-partisan Commission to Reform Social Security (with ‘bi-partisan’ meaning dominated by Blue Dog Dems and Conservative Republicans). Well first of […]

rdan Salon has a short note and a voting widget for whether newspapers should charge for on-line content as a way to increase revenue and I assume stay in business as part of a conversational piece.Charging for on-line information. Locally, whether the Boston Globe stays in business is a major concern. Also, it is also […]

rdan(hat tip reader Julie) A quick reminder with no analysis for a Sunday afternoon on greed is good meme: Wikipedia provides a memory jog for twenty years ago. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The […]

I’m going to have to do a little clean-up work here (i.e., run the data in Excel instead of Stata), so I’ll ask forgiveness for the double-labels and all that.Graphic redone; data as per FRED. I think the story is clear. The long version is Bruce’s post below. What is now the top line is […]

by Bruce Webb As Krugman would say: Wonkish. Last Wednesday I put up a post Vanishing the Social Security Surplus which got some push back in comments by Andrew Biggs. So let me back up a little. Social Security surplus is defined in two ways. One is ‘Income less Interest – Cost’. The other is […]

By Spencer The March employment report continued the trend of the last few months with payroll employment down 694,000, about the same as the last few months. This brought the unemployment rae to 8.5% and job loses of some 5.3 million over the past year.The one encouraging item was a repeat of last month where […]

Robert Waldmann is still trying to think of creative was to use CDS to commit fraud. One key use of CDS was to relax capital controls. A debt instrument plus a CDS from AAA rated AIG counted as AAA debt, thus banks could gamble more if they bought a CDS from AIG. Would this still […]

by Bruce Webb Well the Republican Party and economic conservatives generally have made their position clear, they are openly using the current meltdown as an opportunity to kill Medicare and Social Security as they exist today. We saw this at the Stimulus Summit where the very first question by the Republicans, coming from Senate Minority […]

Headline from the Christian Science Monitor: “As G-20 battles protectionism, a cautionary tale in Ecuador” [emphasis mine] Subhead for that same article: “The country has put steep tariffs on an array of goods. Seventeen of the world’s 20 largest economies have broken recent promises not to take protectionist measures.” [emphasis mine] Presumably, the other three […]