Andrew Samwick states the obvious, clearly and well: I think we are now 18 months behind where we should be in moving forward with sensible government spending plans. We should have pulled the fiscal policy ripcord in January 2008 with a public investment plan designed to repair our aging infrastructure. I’d rather have the 18 […]
Credit crunch, followed by asset deflation. See also Robert’s series of essays in December/January.
After my previous posts on Georgia, it seems only fair to note the bank closings in Illinois today. There have been 13 bank closings posted (as of right now, about 6:50pm) in the state of Illinois since last March. That alone is significant—but, even more interesting, six of them occurred today. This exceeds the previous […]
John Quiggin makes the broad case (link fixed). If you are then stuck with trying to present a Grand Unified Field Theory, you will inevitably lose (or, at best, reduce) the importance of all the agglomerations that follow from the presumption that the Rational Actor is the mean performer—ignoring that no one, including the economists […]
Being a seven-hour drive away, I don’t have as much direct knowledge of the NYC economy as I did a year or so ago. So I have to rely on Different Metrics. Here is one DrektheUninteresting (see #6) (of Scatterplot and Total Drek fame) will love, when he resurfaces. For those who want a contemporary […]
CATO was making much hay a few days ago about budget problems in California, New York, and New Jersey, which can be explained, respectively, by the Governor’s veto of an Assembly-passed budget a few months ago, the decline in tax revenues from financial services firms and continuing loss of upstate industry, and underfunded pension obligations […]
With today’s (well, yesterday’s) five closings, the total of failings of U.S. banks since March of last year to 69. Of those, slightly more than 20% (14) are from the state of Georgia. Excepting the much larger California, there have been more failings in Georgia than in any two other states combined. Also as a […]
Dear Barry: The need for posts such as this one recurs because the large majority of economists are idiots. (Multiple exceptions noted—but not enough to change the truth of the initial statement.) As the regulatory reform report notes (quoted by PK at the last link above): In fact, enforcement of CRA was weakened during the […]
Another dual-bankruptcy female with real estate problems. Wonder what the difference will be?
Susan of Texas has an immortal post on the housing crisis, McMegan’s ratiocination, and the persistence of ignorant memes. The money quote: McArdle doesn’t refute facts, she hen-pecks at the methods used to gather information. That way she doesn’t actually have to prove anything, she just casts enough aspersions on the data to confuse the […]