Is it really Good News that changes in Real Private Inventories were 3.4% of that 5.7% Q-on-Q GDP in Q4? (h/t Alea’s Twitter feed) Most reasonable assumption: firms overproduced, relative to actual buying, in anticipation of the Xmas season. Maybe more later.
Mish sends us to “Track the Money,” recovery.gov’s breakdown of where funds have been sent and spent. He’s not happy, but I suspect he’s suffering the Jared Bernstein Problem: only looking at one side of the equation. But—and this is the key “but”—the reason it is right to do that is that ARRA money has […]
It has long been a standard claim of economics—iirc, Robert Lucas was the first to say it aloud, though it may have been Gary Becker*—that a man who marries his housekeeper lowers GDP. Apparently, Dubner and Levitt have taken this claim—along with their Rick James title**—to heart. Echidne has the details. A short sample: There […]
rdan Rebecca Wilder will begin writing as a Bear soon. Meanwhile, she maintains her own blog NEWSNECONOMICS. Here is an example of an Aug. 19,2009 post, which I am cross posting today, and a follow up post here. There were several questions raised, but I think it an interesting notion. I own an old Malibu […]
If you need to know why we need government (G) spending, consider that there is no investment (I), and the plight of the consumer is summarized here: The rest is basic algebra.
Sometimes, Blog Posts Write Themselves: Cleaning up a hard drive of old files, I ran across these two articles from the middle of last year. First, the WSJ, arbiter of business sanity and purveyor of a positive meme whenever one is to be found, on 28 July 2007—nine months after the general supply of securitizable […]
by Divorced one like Bush(successfully I might add) I had the following quotes sitting around for awhile. Like May of 07. Being that we have a “crisis” with our economy (I have a hard time with the word crisis being used, it implies suddenness, unseen), a new governing philosophy in place and we really, really, […]
Seems it’s not just the executive branch and their friends that have “invested” in this war. From IPS comes a news article about the money invested by our legislators. Members of Congress invested nearly 196 million dollars of their own money in companies that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a day from Pentagon contracts […]
We have been discussing a lot of economics through the political viewer lately. And I certainly have laid my point of view out there, but I also like the theory discussion. I like to think and know how stuff works or how someone interprets what they see. I believe discussing theories leads to better political […]