by reader coberly THE CHOICE The reason for offering this post is that it has become very fashionable among Serious People to propose that raising the retirement age is the “obvious” solution to the “Social Security Crisis.” In a recent exchange I accused an otherwise intelligent and decent person of cruelty by stupidity for proposing […]

by cactus Dean Baker on Autoworkers Pay… Plus Helping Banks One flaw in this blog, if you ask me, is that we don’t link to Dean Baker enough. He generally covers a lot of material in a short amount of space, and is right more often than he’s wrong. So if y’all keep your mouths […]

As President Obama issues executive orders and presents bills to Congress, Angry Bears will respond, or guests will post. However, such changes appear to be happening so quickly I am sure we cannot keep up. Readers should feel free to leave a link here in comments for us to check regularly and develop ideas for […]

rdan GAO has a report on regulation deficiencies of financial markets: Several key changes in financial markets and products in recent decades have highlighted significant limitations and gaps in the existing regulatory system. • First, regulators have struggled, and often failed, to mitigate the systemic risks posed by large and interconnected financial conglomerates and to […]

by cactus A Country in a Hostile Region(updated version of post) Say there’s a country sitting in a hostile area. A big part of the hostility has to do with religion – the greater part of the country’s population has a faith different than that of the neighboring countries, and which is somewhat despised by […]

Give me some help here. With the 2003 Social Security Report the Trustees launched a new measure for evaluating the strength of their projections going forwards. And it can be found here: Appendix E. STOCHASTIC PROJECTIONS 1. BackgroundThe Trustees Report has traditionally shown additional estimates using a low cost and a high cost set of […]

rdan The Financial Times offers some thoughts on the Fed’s exit strategy when the economy begins to improve. This question was asked in comments in relation to the advisability of government intervention at all due to the lack of thought to ending the intervention. (Returning the control back to private banking).

rdan The Second Report of the Congressional Oversight Panel of January 9, 2009 from the Oversight Committee for TARP makes for beginning reading. Mostly unanswered questions, but no surprise. If no subpoenas are needed Elizabeth Warren who heads the committee may get more answers to sensible questions over time.

By Spencer This chart from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank is starting to appear on various web sites. Among others, Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution published it. It is an interesting looking chart, very similar to many I do. But it struck me as odd, there was something wrong with it. I can not remember […]

by Bruce Webb (first three sentences edited since original post a few minutes ago)The 2005 Report was a mild disappointment. The 2006 Report somewhat worse. 2007 showed some mild improvement but didn’t even get us back to 2005 numbers. Now the 2008 on the surface looked a lot brighter but most of that turned out […]