This week’s bid by a Chinese oil company (CNOOC) to buy an American oil company (Unocal) has provoked some interesting reactions in Washington. Despite the fact that 70% of Unocal’s oil reserves are in Asia, that it supplies just 1% of US oil needs, and that oil is highly fungible (meaning that oil from one […]

Mark Thoma does a nice job of reviewing Andrew Roth’s argument for the DeMint Social Security proposal. To be honest, I have stopped saying much about these free lunch fallacies as Mark has in general been doing a wonderful job explaining these issues. But let me add that Lawrence Hunter makes a little more sense […]

Greenspan made some reasonable points about US trade with China during his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee today. First, he said that a yuan revaluation against the dollar probably will do next to nothing to rescue US manufacturing. Second, he pointed out that tariffs on Chinese products will be equally ineffective. Greenspan, testifying before […]

Thomas Nugent provides a very extended “question” that Republican Congressman Ron Paul asked Alan Greenspan and then notes: Maybe these politicians simply improvise around the questions their interns write for them. But more than likely they have no clue what they’re talking about. Of course, there’s ample entertainment value to all this. Just look at […]

Alex Tabarrok adds to the debate: The real question is not whether there is a bubble the question is, What are the chances that housing prices will fall dramatically? Contrary to popular belief, knowledge of whether prices are following fundamentals or a bubble tells us very little about this question. An efficient market is not […]

CalculatedRisk previewed the latest UCLA Anderson Forecast and Dr. Leamer is concerned that residential investment demand will decline – especially in California. Lawrence Kudlow suggests that Leamer and CalculatedRisk are “bubbleheads”. Kudlow gives a couple of interesting reasons for questioning forecasts of weak residential investment, but he also provides the following strange logic: Although year-to-date […]

This morning the US Secretary of Energy, Sam Bodman, offered his analysis of today’s high oil prices. Short version: don’t expect anything to change soon. WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said Wednesday it will take years to close the gap between increasing world oil consumption and the ability of oil producers to […]

Brooke Oberwetter’s critique of Wexler’s Social Security proposal wants us to believe that we can somehow avoid tax increases. But then there is this: He has proposed the largest marginal tax increase this country has seen in decades: a 6 percent tax hike on all income over the current $90,000 payroll tax cap. Let us […]

The price of oil is at around $60 per barrel for the second day in a row today. Note that this is this highest price for crude oil in real terms since the end of 1982. Naturally, this means that the value of US oil imports will continue to grow from their already high levels. […]

Southern California is known for its freeways, which are often jammed with traffic. Amy Argetsinger and Steven Ginsberg report on our experiment with private toll roads. As I resident of LA who rarely even uses the public freeways, I did not even know these toll roads were privately owned. I also certainly did not know […]