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

One Less Blog to Answer: No More "Girl Economist"

Between deadlines and strange website blockages, I missed this yesterday. Via Steve Randy Waldman (whose “Interfludity” is blocked) and Mark Thoma (whose isn’t) comes Really Bad News: To all Maxine Udall Girl Economist Readers: It is with great sadness that we bring you the news that Dr. Alison Snow Jones, aka Maxine Udall, Girl Economist, […]

Thinking about Performance

My aging Subaru had a problem a while back. Leak of transmission fluid; a seal or another failing, leading to steady dripping out. And with little need to open the hood, no gauge—or even an “idiot light”—on the dashboard, it dripped for quite a while. And then some. The first repair—call it Quizzical Effort 1—refilled […]

Math is Math: There Was No "Second Stimulus"

One of the best rules in mathematics is that, to determine the value of all the variables, you need only as many distinct equations as you have variables. (previous sentence edited for clarity.) So let’s combine a couple of recent articles (h/t Mark Thoma for the first, Digby for the second.) Richard Florida finds three […]

Duncan Black, Ph.D. who Specializes in the Economies of Cities, Explains It All to You

Bruce has made this point repeatedly. Dr. Black puts it in more direct language: [I]nevitably the Social Security Trustees will, perfectly justifiably, tweak a few assumptions about future economic activity so that there will be a DOOM scenario, an EVERYTHING’S AWESOME scenario, and a “uh oh maybe in about 40 years we will have a […]

The Pound’s Not Sinking, The Yen’s Not Keeping Up…

Spent the past few minutes reading Alea. jck notes that, over the past five years, the Pound has grown in importance at the expense of the yen and that the Euro has done the same against the dollar. If this goes against your memory, you’re not part of the IMF. Even better is when jck […]

Economics: a visual approach

Lee Arnold has a series of visual presentations at a high school level that might be useful to introduce different topics to friends and family that do not follow econoblogs. Here is the introduction to the series, which Lee tells me is for dissemination. (The visuals are copyrighted to help prevent voice overs and other […]

Flashback: How Donald Luskin Earned His Title

Max Sawicky, on his Twitter feed, sends us to this classic piece from Donald Luskin Believe me, if we raise taxes on hedge-fund managers we’ll get fewer hedge-fund managers. Today, with lots of hedge-fund managers trading all the time and keeping markets efficient, stocks are at record highs around the globe and markets are deeper, […]

Everything Old is New Again, Part 1934-1937

I have (vainly, I suspect, in both senses of the phrase), tried to start a meme on Twitter, #ifTimGeithnerrantheEmergencyRoom. “The defibrillator would only charge to 30 to prevent scarring; anything more and you’re on your own” probably isn’t winning friends or influencing people, but it does make me feel better. It also makes me look […]