Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Fire Tim Geithner. Then Be a One-Term President.

I doubt even the Internet’s self-appointed Chief Geithner Apologist will be foolish enough to stand by him after this piece of shite: Some people just don’t like movies with happy endings. How else to explain this week’s report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP)? Rather than […]

What Do We Mean When We Say "Structural Unemployment"? Part 1

This needs to be screamed far and wide from the highest mountain to the deepest sea, at the top of one’s lungs: There is no reason to think that the bulk of current unemployment is any sense “structural”: if aggregate demand were higher it would melt away just as unemployment in 1982 melted away. The […]

UC-Berkeley Law School Degrades Itself Even More

No wonder Brad DeLong has had no luck persuading Christopher Edley to get rid of the malfeasant John Yoo. As Bob Somersby observes: Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” It’s hard to believe, but that’s the exceptionally low-IQ framework this self-proclaimed member of the elite enunciated in Sunday’s piece. According to Edley, rubes […]

More Detail on Working the Refs

So there are several comments to my previous post. Ignoring the a good one from Dr. DeLong, several people are taking umbrage at my unsubtle suggestion that the effect on employment being suggested is, to be polite about it, rather creative. kharris begins, “So let me see if I have this right. If anybody tries […]

The Other Rule

Brad DeLong’s famous rule (Originally: “If you think Paul Krugman must be wrong, you severely overestimated Niall Ferguson“) needs a corollary. If Olivier Blanchard says your macroeconomic policy doesn’t work, and that you should double your inflation target to make it reasonable, it’s worth trying: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist, Olivier Blanchard, says central […]

Measuring Bubbles

Brad DeLong and John Cochrane agree on something. I must dissent. Delong and Cochrane agree that “The underlying decline in wealth from the housing bust was … around $400 billion. …” Indeed, relative to the size of the economy the losses during the crash of the dot-com bubble were four times as large. I object […]

Bernanke Part 2 of 2: Leaders Lead, or Just Say No

The world would be a much better place if people had listened to Tom last August: Now some elite opinion favors Ben Bernanke’s reappointment, but politicians are irritated over Fed stonewalling of bailout oversight and others (e.g. Dean Baker) point out that Ben Bernanke who put the Fed throttles to the firewall to save the […]

Not the Cheeriest Way to Start the Day: Bernanke Part 1 of 2

It’s bad enough to violate Brad DeLong’s first rule (which, I hasten to rationalize, was posted when DeLong himself was disagreeing). It’s worse when the opposition to Krugman is coming from…the WSJ editorial page. (Or, as Barry Ritholtz correctly describes it, “the comics section.” Just less funny, and more likely to make the two-drink minimum […]

Are TBTF Banks Out of Danger? The Market Doesn’t Think So

Down here it’s just winners and losersAnd don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line This will be a long post. Even with all the pictures above the fold. It started with a finger exercise during my daughter’s swim team practice: Just in case you thought I was picking on The Big C […]

Hoisted from Comments (thought not here)

UPDATE: D-Squared chimes in, saying in less than 100 words what took me a couple of thousand (though with no quotes): After the “first hundred days” in the term of a new Democratic President comes the next stage; the almost impreceptible transition among his supporters from saying “of course, he’s been hampered by all sorts […]