Lawrence Lindsey wants the next assistant attorney general for antitrust to be an economist. Like Mark Thoma, I have a mixed reaction to this op-ed. Let’s start with this rightwing Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc canard: Two of the precipitating events for the NASDAQ bubble collapse in the spring of 2000 were the antitrust division’s […]
The debate between Brad DeLong and Andrew Samwick could be characterized as a question of how strong the labor market really is. Samwick argues that some ancillary statistics that the BLS reports about the strength of the labor market (e.g. the numbers of discouraged workers, and those who otherwise do not have jobs but would […]
The May employment report released this morning by the BLS is quite disappointing: Nonfarm employment edged up by 78,000 in May following a much larger increase in April, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 5.1 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Payroll employment continued to […]
The US economy has achieved incredibly rapid productivity improvements over the past few years. Yet until recently, firms have been able to keep those gains to themselves rather than increasing the compensation they offer their workers. Over the past year or so, that appears to have started to change. From today’s BLS release on productivity […]
David Brook’s latest attack on America’s liberals points to European policies and claims that folks with relatively high income are worse off than folks whose income may be low but rising: Anybody who has lived in Europe knows how delicious European life can be. But it is not the absolute standard of living that determines […]
Rather than go on and on about the nonsense that emanates from the free lunch proponents of Social Security privatization – or those free lunch supply-side wingnuts who argue “giving people their money back” so they consume more somehow increases economic growth – let me simply outsource this task to Daniel Gross: How dumb are […]
Why does the news from Detroit continue to remind me of the early 1980’s: General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., the two biggest U.S. automakers, saw sales slip again in May as customers continued to turn away from sport utility vehicles and trucks in favor of models from Japanese competitors. And given the fact […]
Today the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) released its latest estimates of house prices in the US, covering the first quarter of 2005. Unsurprisingly, house prices continue to go up. WASHINGTON, D.C. – Average U.S. home prices increased 12.50 percent from the first quarter of 2004 through the first quarter of 2005. Appreciation […]
How Machiavellian was the Nixon White House? The reaction of some of Nixon’s aids to the news that Mark Felt was Deep Throat speaks volumes. Consider this comment from Gordon Liddy: I view him as someone who violated the ethics of the law-enforcement profession, in that if he possessed evidence of wrongdoing, he was honor […]
As I start getting reaquainted with the financial press following my 10-day ‘vacation’, the first thing that has caught my attention is the continued fall in long-term interest rates. The ‘conundrum’ about which Alan Greenspan spoke a few months ago has not resolved itself, after briefly appearing as though it might back in March. Instead, […]