Brad DeLong reads John Tamny and somehow retains the clarity of thought to realize something Ben Bernanke picked up on that we also discussed: Bernanke’s point is that in the second quarter households, the government, and investing businesses bought one-half percent more goods and services than U.S. producers made and U.S. businesses (net) imported. Thus […]

Brad DeLong catches James “DOW 36000” Glassman complaining about Paul Krugman being a stalker: “By the way, none of the tumultuous events of the past six years has changed our minds about our thesis. In fact, despite terrorist attacks and a recession, price-to-earnings ratios have remained high, in historic terms, just as we predicted…” We […]

Via Mark Thoma comes an interesting discussion from The Economist as to why interest rates are low: The most popular explanation is that there is a global glut of savings, which has driven yields down … If desired saving increases relative to investment (ie, there is excess saving), the IS curve shifts to the left […]

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs was the title of an op-ed by Robert Barro just before the 1992 election. While Barro was not about to endorse either Clinton or Perot, he opened his op-ed by blasting President George H. W. Bush for suggesting increasing Federal spending was necessary to create new jobs. It seems that the current […]

Mark Thoma focuses on what Ben Bernanke has been saying recently, while Brad DeLong noted what he did not say: He apparently failed to stress two important things: Bush administration fiscal policy is way out of balance in the long run, and this is a very serious problem: if the government doesn’t balance its budget […]

The only things that I remember about the movie Coyote Ugly are: (1) it was an awful movie; (2) it featured some rather attractive young women; and (3) one of them loved to scream “at least it doesn’t suck”. Max Sawicky seems to say the same thing about the U.S. economy: Whatever its merits, the […]

Max speaks and we should all listen: There are no tax cuts. Banish that phrase from your mind. You haven’t seen any. Republican control of the White House and Congress has yielded trillions in tax increases since January of 2001. How can this be? Simple. When you spend more, and when you pass laws that […]

James Hamilton provided an interesting discussion of monetary policy in advance of today’s FED decision with some good links that did not include Mark Thoma: Thus, according to the CBOT 30-Day Federal Funds futures contract, there is a 100% chance the target rate will increase .25% to 3.50%, and a 9% chance it will increase […]

Cokie Roberts on ABC’s This Week suggested that the Novak blow-up showed that we need a “press shield law”. It seems the WSJ op-ed folks have sounded a similar theme: we warned that the media would regret their demand for a special counsel to discover Mr. Novak’s sources, since that same counsel would eventually turn […]

Brad DeLong catches Donald Luskin failing to understand that “deficit” means the annual increase in “debt”: When an American (1) labors or invests to earn money, (2) chooses to spend that money on foreign goods, and (3) the foreign maker of those goods doesn’t spend that money on American goods, somehow debt is created. I […]