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

I Hate It When My Cynicism is the OPTIMISTIC Version

I wisecracked yesterday chez DeLong that, given the current political climate, I wouldn’t invest in a company without political connections using his money, let alone my own. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Supreme Court already had decided earlier yesterday that investing in mutual funds should be a hazardous activity: Janus […]

Health Care thoughts: Reality is Ugly

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care: Reality is Ugly An Indiana baby with an extremely rare condition will not be receiving $500,000 experimental surgery at Duke because the State of Indiana cannot afford to pay the bill for the surgery. The immediate howls of protest are directed at the Republican governor, but there are […]

Steve Randy Waldman Explains It All to You

Not certain this link will work, but at Interfluidity, SRW replies to Karl Smith, closing with a sentiment with which I am very much in sympathy: It is not technocratic economists who will win the day and pull us out of our cul-de-sac, but angry Irishmen and Spaniards who challenge, on moral terms, the right […]

Should Potential Employers have Access to Credit Scores ?

Robert Waldmann Oh good, Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias disagree. This is bound to be interesting. Drum remembers the good old days when liberals had less respect for the standard results of simple neoclassical economic models. The specific issue is that firms are using credit scores to decide who to hire. This can trap some […]

Crooked Timber notes from the FT

First, go read Henry on the lambasting of, especially, Turkey by U.S. idiots. Apparently, any U.N. vote is wholly the responsibility of everyone except the people who presented the resolution. Note also that the editorial page has a much more interesting piece on economics than all those Zogby myths. Maybe more about that later, but […]

A Look at the Evidence: Predatory Lending, Borrowing, and Jack Cashill

The opening chapter of Jack Cashill’s Popes and Bankers relates his version of the tale of Melonie Griffith-Evans, a woman who in 2004 borrowed her way to losing her house.  Ms. Griffith-Evans accepted loans in order to buy a house priced at $470,000 that resulted in her having to pay “roughly $3,500 a month.”  Of […]

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 […]

How to Explain Moral Hazard

It took me many years to understand the phrase “moral hazard.” It’s a fundamental tenet of economics, usually used to explain that, since consumers are untrustworthy, businesses need to charge them more.* It was finally cleared up for me in the midst of a presentation last year about how it’s a “moral hazard” issue that […]

This is What a Giant Vampire Squid Looks Like

Via Greg Mitchell’s Twitter feed, lying isn’t just for the IB branch any more: Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003. Unable to identify a […]

More on Dubner and Levitt II

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 […]