Interest Rates and Employment Reports Take a look at the yield on the 10 year bond over the past 3 months (40 indicates an interest rate of 4.0%, etc.): Something seems a bit odd to me about this picture: namely, those massive swings in bond prices (and thus yields) that have happened with each of […]

Promoting Economic Growth in Developing Countries I found a nice paper that addresses an issue occasionally touched on here – economic growth (and the lack thereof) in the developing world. It’s an IMF working paper by Philippe Beaugrand, one of the IMF’s Africa specialists, and it nicely summarizes one school of thought about how to […]

Iraq Deteriorates Further The violent uprising has now spread to at least half a dozen cities in Iraq. Perhaps even more worrying than simply the number of cities that have turned into combat zones in the past few days, or even than rapidly climbing casualty figures (39 coalition troops killed in the past 7 days), […]

Daddy, Where Do Republicans Come From? Seriously, I read something like this (and this) and I can reach only one conclusion: come November, if more than half the people who vote (roughly; see Florida, 2000) actually vote for George W. Bush then I’ll have to simply give up. Politics, sound policy, and the common weal […]

More From Gary Hart In Salon today: The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, co-chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman and myself, reported to President George W. Bush and his new administration in January 2001 that terrorists were surely going to attack the United States and that our country was woefully unprepared. We documented the […]

Indeed John Kerry, in Cincinnati: “There is nothing conservative about running up deficits as far as the eye can see, there is nothing conservative about piling debt on our children and building up the annual interest payments for that debt so we can’t fund education, health care.” AB

Hidden Cost Update Yesterday, I asked which official, “before the war, put the cost [of Iraq] in the low single-digit billions.” This is what I was vaguely recalling: On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of […]

Bad Poll News for Bush From the latest Pew poll, via Yahoo: Still, a majority supports his decision to use military force in Iraq, says the poll released Monday. Four in 10, or 40 percent, approve of the way Bush is handling Iraq, while 53 percent disapprove. That’s down from six in 10 who approved […]

Operation Liberty and Justice for All Can we fire whoever it is that comes up with names for military operations these days? Afghanistan is “Enduring Freedom,” the Iraq War is codenamed “Iraqi Freedom,” and now the current operations in and around Fallujah are codenamed “Vigilant Resolve.” It’s a codename, not an explanation, statement of principal, […]

Urban Job Markets Under Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II In a nice bit of work, G. Scott Thomas of American City Business Journals (a non-partisan straight news entity as far as I can tell) crunched the last 25 years’ job numbers; his results put last weeks’s good jobs news into context: • Nearly […]