All I could say when I read Kevin Drum today on single-payer health care was “YES”: [F]or tactical political reasons, [prominent Democratic politicians] think it’s more effective to talk about incremental solutions. I disagree. …The alternative, I think, is to continue supporting improvements to the current system but to make it absolutely clear that our […]
Brad Setser objects to the following from Sebastian Mallaby: There’s a powerful reason for China’s recalcitrance. The country’s technocrats were convinced years ago that revaluation made economic sense. But revaluation would cut the price of food imports, depressing earnings of Chinese farmers. Faced with simmering discontent among rural Chinese who have been left behind by […]
The “M3” measure of money is almost gone. At least, it’s probably almost gone. Its last publication is due to happen on March 23, which means that M3-related reporting requirements for financial firms end this week. However, there remains an outside chance that Congressional interference could yet scuttle the Fed’s plan to terminate the M3 […]
George Will has decided the former Senator John Edwards has an old paradigm of what causes poverty in America: Edwards has a 1930s paradigm of poverty: Poor people are like everyone else; they just lack goods and services (housing, transportation, training, etc.) that government knows how to deliver. Hence he calls for a higher minimum […]
I wanted to follow-up on a couple of aspects as to my post noting Dick Cheney hoping people would save more. First of all – one of our readers is now saying Bush and his allies never said that the Administration wanted to give people their money back so they could consume more. Yes – […]
The 10-year bond is yielding over 4.7% this morning. That’s the highest long-term interest rate anytime in the past year: Note: 10-year interest rate expressed in tenths of a percentage point, so “47” indicates 4.7%, etc. Interest rates were higher for a few weeks during May and June of 2004, but other than that one […]
The Washington Post gives us a nice reminder today: Meet the typical American family. It has about $3,800 in the bank. No one has a retirement account, and the neighbors who do only have about $35,000 in theirs. Mutual funds? Stocks? Bonds? Nope. The house is worth $160,000, but the family owes $95,000 on it […]
Brad DeLong shares his lecture notes on the equity premium: There is, somewhere, a marginal investor: somebody just about indifferent between stocks and bonds. If the expected return to stocks were a little higher, he or she would move more money to stocks. If the extra risk associated with holding stocks were a little lower, […]
As I was reading another gem from Brad Setser on the Dark Matter controversy (Brad links to a very nice paper by Carol Corrado, Charles Hutten, and Daniel Sichel that shows the investment/GDP ratio has declined even if one included investment in intangible capital), one of his readers points out an AP story where Dick […]
Paul Krugman’s internet stalker is posting addendum after addendum to his The Abramoff Math Scandal, which he first ran on February 24. His only point, however, was already covered on January 28 by Kevin – who has more here: Bottom line: as everyone knows, Abramoff was a lifelong Republican operative and steered the vast bulk […]