Postcards from Old Europe – Special Easter edition Note: This week’s postcard comes one day early courtesy of Easter! Easter is a time to celebrate rebirth and renewal; something many European economies could really profit from. In discussions with friends and colleagues I’ve often heard the question: “Well, why don’t you change something? Why don’t […]

Reality in Iraq v. the Bush Administration From today’s NYTimes: Account of Broad Shiite Revolt Contradicts White House Stand United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising that goes well beyond supporters of one militant Islamic cleric who has been the focus of American counterinsurgency efforts, United States intelligence officials said Wednesday. That assertion […]

Kerry’s Fiscal Prudence Yesterday Kerry gave a major policy address, in which he reoriented his economic proposals around the idea of fiscal discipline. As the Washington Post describes it: Sen. John F. Kerry outlined a broad deficit-reduction policy yesterday, scaling back several campaign promises that he now concedes the country cannot afford if his new […]

Echo Chamber? Arianna Huffington on blogs, in Salon: And because blogs are ongoing and daily, indeed sometimes hourly, bloggers will often start with a small story, or a piece of one — a contradictory quote, an unearthed document, a detail that doesn’t add up — that the big outlets would deem too minor. But it’s […]

What’s Up with Import Prices? Some people may find this morning’s release of the March import price data by the BLS a bit puzzling. It shows that, excluding oil, the price of imported goods into the US hasn’t really been rising – it has gone up by just 1.0% in the past 12 months (between […]

Interest Rates and Employment Reports Take a look at the yield on the 10 year bond over the past 3 months (40 indicates an interest rate of 4.0%, etc.): Something seems a bit odd to me about this picture: namely, those massive swings in bond prices (and thus yields) that have happened with each of […]

Promoting Economic Growth in Developing Countries I found a nice paper that addresses an issue occasionally touched on here – economic growth (and the lack thereof) in the developing world. It’s an IMF working paper by Philippe Beaugrand, one of the IMF’s Africa specialists, and it nicely summarizes one school of thought about how to […]

Iraq Deteriorates Further The violent uprising has now spread to at least half a dozen cities in Iraq. Perhaps even more worrying than simply the number of cities that have turned into combat zones in the past few days, or even than rapidly climbing casualty figures (39 coalition troops killed in the past 7 days), […]

Daddy, Where Do Republicans Come From? Seriously, I read something like this (and this) and I can reach only one conclusion: come November, if more than half the people who vote (roughly; see Florida, 2000) actually vote for George W. Bush then I’ll have to simply give up. Politics, sound policy, and the common weal […]

More From Gary Hart In Salon today: The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, co-chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman and myself, reported to President George W. Bush and his new administration in January 2001 that terrorists were surely going to attack the United States and that our country was woefully unprepared. We documented the […]