He is certainly my favorite inside-the-beltway budget analyst:
Capital Gains and Games | Washington, Wall Street and Everything in Between: Policymakers and the financial services community think about each other all the time, but neither really understands what the other is doing. This blog, written by Stan Collender, is [...]
Wearing black dress socks that have lost their elastic with one's best suit is not recommended unless one has much prettier ankles than I do.
UPDATE: Profgrrrl has more serious problems
Paul Krugman writing in Economic Policy estimates that at a real dollar depreciation rate of 2% per year the US is headed for a steady-state capital-account position of -15 months' GDP, and that at a rate of 4% per year is headed for -7 months' GDP. Yet foreigners--both private and [...]
Berkeley sentence of the day:
Let's go to Espresso Experience next to Musical Offering: Foucault always liked to go there...
Winston Churchill, May 11, 1943:
Never forget that there are 185 German divisions against the Russians.... We are not at present in contact with any.... We cannot afford to have idle armies while the Russians are bearing such a disproportionate weight...
From Rick Atkinson (2007), The Day of Battle
Robert writes:
Robert's Stochastic thoughts: Jonathan Cohn puts a baseball on a tee and Jonathan Cohn hits it out of the park
The treatment Mike [Kinsley] received is called Deep Brain Stimulation, or DBS for short. [snip] It is also very costly. Medtronic, a company that makes [...]
It appears that Paul Krugman wins his fight with David Brooks, who had written this about Paul Krugman's invocation of Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi:
David Brooks: History and Calumny: Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has [...]
Alex Tabarrok gets his flu shot, and opines:
Marginal Revolution: Kiss me, I'm vaccinated: I just had my flu shot. Please send your checks to my George Mason address. People who have the flu spread the virus so getting a flu shot not only reduces the probability that I [...]
Paul Krugman writes:
Robert Rubin is wrong about the dollar: He says: “You could have had [budget] surpluses that affected the savings rate and would have helped the trade balance. I think you would have had more confidence in the policy framework and you would have had a [...]
At the FT, Eoin Callan sees good news on trade. It is, however, kinda scary that they are not negotiating--that they are just negotiating about how to negotiate:
FT.com / World - US and Europe aim to resolve trade disputes : Diplomats from the US and European Union are [...]
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post outdoes himself:
Deal With Colombia: Colombia's exports already enjoy preferential access to the U.S. market.... The TPA would expand [these preferences] and make them permanent.... But congressional Democrats say no, citing Bogota's alleged [...]
Linkmeister: Taps: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT'S ARMISTICE DAY ADDRESS
Arlington Cemetery, November 11, 1941: Among the great days of national remembrance, none is more deeply moving to Americans of our generation than the Eleventh of November, the Anniversary of the Armistice of 1918, the day sacred to the memory [...]
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud:
Citigroup: Fortune: When Citigroup first reported the writedown three weeks ago, you said that you supported Citi and Chuck Prince. Do you feel like you were misled? Did the situation change? What happened there?
Prince Alwaleed: Let me tell [...]
Yes, it is yet another edition of why oh why can't we have a better press corps. This time it is Bob Herbert who should be retired and sent to doing something socially useful:
Recession? What Recession?: If it looks like a recession and feels like a recession.... “Quite [...]
Dani Rodrik suspects that they are smaller than Josh Bivens thinks they are:
Dani Rodrik's weblog: The pains from trade: The workhorse model of international trade (the 2x2 Heckscher-Ohlin model) has very stark implications for the effect of trade with poor, labor-abundant countries. Low-skilled workers in rich countries (read the [...]
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? (Yet another New York Times should be deeply ashamed edition.)
Let's start with the reminiscences of Republican Svengali Lee Atwater:
Lee Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the [...]
"Wow! We are getting much more classy and beautiful jewelery catalogs these days!" says Ann Marie:
Baldwin writes:
Krugman’s view on the dollar | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from Europe's leading economists: Flashback to 1985: Krugman’s view on the dollar: Rummaging around the web last night I came across a Paul Krugman paper on the how far and how fast the dollar [...]
Via Unfogged:
Unfogged: Indeed: The waitress says,
"You people are really nuts," she told a reporter during a phone interview. "There's kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now -- there's better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary [...]
Tyler writes:
Marginal Revolution: Supercapitalism, by Robert Reich:
Finally, I will come to some conclusions you may find surprising -- among them, why the move toward improved corporate governance makes companies less likely to be socially responsible. Why the promise of corporate democracy is illusory. Why [...]
Recall that we ought to be running a full employment surplus of $300+ billion a year right now to prepare for the retirement of the baby-boom generation--that's the policy that generates stable tax rates for the non medical care part of the budget. Menzie Chinn writes:
Econbrowser: If this [...]
And he arouses Kevin Drum's ire:
The Washington Monthly: SPEAK FOR YOURSELF....Responding to my suggestion earlier today that the American public increasingly opposes the Iraq war regardless of how well it's going, Tobin Harshaw of the Opinionator says:
It's a good point, but I suspect some will [...]
Import iPhone Call Log to iCal - iphonelogd [digg.com]:
Ruby script by Jamie Hardt — it reads your iPhone call log from your iPhone backup (created by iTunes) and copies phone calls into the iCal calendar of your choice. (via daring fireball) How to: Download script, create new calendar [...]
Somebodies want to buy insurance against credit defaults, and some other bodies don't much want to sell. From Calculated Risk:
Calculated Risk: ABX Cliff Diving: This chart is the ABX-HE-AAA- 07-2 close today. The ABX was stabilizing, and then.... Oops!
That cliff is a 10% fall, [...]
Felix Salmon writes:
Finance Blog - Market Movers by Felix Salmon: The Best Subprime Reporting and Analysis - Portfolio.com: Jack Flack and Jack Shafer look to the MSM today for help in unscrambling the subprime mess. (Weirdly, however, Shafer asks journalists to nominate the best journalists on this beat, [...]
Kevin Drum alerts Matthew Yglesias to Robert.Samuelson@Hooverville.com:
Matthew Yglesias: Liquidate!: Kevin Drum notes Robert Samuelson pointing out that recessions have benefits, too. Benefits like low wages:
Recessions also have often-overlooked benefits. They dampen inflation. In weak markets, companies can't easily raise prices or workers' wages. Similarly, recessions [...]
Clive writes:
FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: Update: It depends what you mean by torture: Stuart Taylor on the criticism Michael Mukasey, the White House nominee for attorney-general, has faced over his reluctance to say that waterboarding is torture, and hence illegal....
The surge of Democratic opposition [...]
When wingnuts cheat and sue each other. Kevin Drum reports:
The Washington Monthly: SCHADENFREUDE ALERT....The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The [...]
"Wow! [Robert Reich's] The Work of Nations is so readable!"
"Do you think we could get him to sign it?"
If you are not reading Econobrowser, you should be; consistent extraordinarily high-quality thoughts from James Hamilton and Menzie Chinn. Most recently, from Jim Hamilton:
Econbrowser: Well then, would $100 a barrel worry you? A week ago I reviewed the reasons why $90-a-barrel oil by itself would not be enough [...]
I have a review of Freakonomics clones in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review [chronicle.com]:
In the beginning were the Steves--Steve Dubner and Steve Levitt, that is. And Steve Dubner interviewed Steve Levitt, who taught at the University of Chicago and had won the American Economic Association's Clark Medal [...]
Citigroup's CFO Gary Crittendon speaks:
Citigroup Business Update Call - Seeking Alpha: Gary Crittenden:
The way I would think about that is these were super senior securities, right? So they were in theory better than investment grade securities. If you track that index, at least the numbers that [...]
Matthew Yglesias writes:
Matthew Yglesias: John Edwards... [makes what] seems like an important point:
But there is a difference between doing everything in our power to keep America safe and a reckless, belligerent policy that actually makes us less safe. The preventive war doctrine was a stunning [...]
Hoisted from Comments: Robert Waldmann writes in from sunny Italy:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: I think teen age pregnancy has a small effect on infant mortality.... [T]he raw correlation... is... that infants of teenagers are more likely to die, but teenage mothers are poorer [...]
Madlen Read of AP:
Citigroup CEO Resigns; Interim Named: : Citigroup Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Prince, beset by the company's billions of dollars in losses from investing in bad debt, resigned Sunday and is being replaced as chairman by former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin.
The [...]
Outsourced to Robert Waldmann, who watches Robert Pear do the "opinions on shape of earth differ" shuffle:
Robert's Stochastic thoughts: Sometimes You Just Can't Overcome the Left Wing Balance of the Facts: Robert Pear has an interesting article in the New York Times on SCHIP. Pear covers the debate [...]
Simon writes:
Simon Johnson's Blog: The Dollar (answering your questions): Many key currencies, including the dollar, have market determined values. The IMF doesn't try to predict short-run (daily, weekly, monthly etc) movements in market determined exchange rate; that is simply not the business we are in.
We look [...]
Mark Thoma [economistsview.typepad.com] tells us that Mankiw's latest on health care might raise an eyebrow or two... [www.iht.com]:
"Beyond those health care numbers." By N. Gregory Mankiw. Saturday, November 3, 2007: Here are three true but misleading facts about health care that politicians and pundits in the United [...]
Now that the dollar has dropped 43% from its high against the euro, the process of global rebalancing has finally begun. The U.S. trade and current account deficits have begun to shrink relative to American and world GDP. Asian current account surpluses are about to start to shrink as well--especially if growth slows markedly [...]
Ben Bernanke says: look at the employment-to-population ratio as well as the unemployment rate:
Angry Bear: Dean also notes that Ben Bernanke also gets it:
However, my sense is that, when one looks at the full range of information available, the labor market looks (if anything) weaker [...]
We were just passed by a Prius going 85...
In my experience there are two kinds of Prius drivers:
(A) I suppose that the first lesson from talking to people about Riccardo Rebonato's The Plight of the Fortune Tellers is how foolish we academics are in thinking that there are things that go without saying: a great deal of the very large value of the book comes in saying [...]
Matthew Yglesias writes:
Giuliani's Character: Paul Krugman notes that Rudy Giuliani's running around the country saying things about health care policy that aren't true, and wonders "Why isn’t Mr. Giuliani’s behavior here considered not just a case of bad policy analysis but a character issue?" It's a good question.
[...]
He writes:
WEALTH OF NATIONS: Democrats Are Winning On Health Care (11/02/2007): Republican plans are cheaper... only because they are so much less ambitious.... None of these ideas -- not even McCain's, the best of the bunch -- frontally addresses the belief that the system is broken and, as [...]
Eric Dash:
$75 Billion Fund Is Seen as Stopgap:Nearly three weeks after the country’s biggest banks announced a $75 billion fund to help stabilize the credit markets, the reality is sinking in that the plan will provide hospice care to troubled investment funds, not resuscitate them. The reason, market [...]
One more to add to the pile: Prince of Darkness--the book by and about Robert Novak.
A commenter says:
in the book, Novak admits to many, many episodes of soft blackmail and soft corruption. In my experience people who admit and boast of soft blackmail and soft corruption engage in hard [...]
Citigroup's board of directors may well dismiss its CEO Charles Prince today. They will thank him for his four years of service--during which Citi earned profits of a magnitude too big for me to wrap my brain around--give him a golden parachute, and send him on his way. They will [...]
Suppose that I decide to use AppSnapp to jailbreak my iPhone. What third-party applications are then worth putting on it?
What is the mapping, exactly, between ISBN-10 and ISBN-13?
Ah:
Any ISBN-13 prefixed with '978' can be converted to an ISBN-10 [www.bisg.org] [en.wikipedia.org]. There is no ISBN-10 equivalent, however, for an ISBN-13 beginning with '979'. Beginning January 1, 2007, ISBN agencies [...]
George Borjas writes:
The Borjas Blog: I Shoulda...: Headline on Drudge:
BILLIONAIRE BUFFETT: I SHOULD PAY MORE TAX...
Quick thought: Who's stopping him?
Clearly George Borjas didn't get the memo:
FORTUNE Magazine: Warren Buffett gives away his fortune: 85% of his Berkshire stock [will go] [...]
Greg Ip writes:
Bernanke, in First Crisis, Rewrites Fed Playbook: WASHINGTON -- On the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 9, with a panic driving up short-term interest rates in Europe and the U.S., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's office became a war room. His closest advisers took seats in the [...]
Another Comment on Mark Schmitt, who wrote:
Divide and Concur - Mark Schmitt: After the institutional reforms of the 1970s, the conservative coalition slowly moved into the Republican Party.... [W]e now have parties that offer a choice. [Ron] Brownstein sees them pulling further and further away from the center, [...]
What I am teaching today:
Dani Rodrik (1995), "Getting Interventions Right: How South Korea and Taiwan Grew Rich": Economic Policy, Vol. 10, No. 20. (Apr., 1995), pp. 53-107:
Abstract: Most explanations of Korea's and Taiwan's economic growth since the early 1960s place heavy emphasis on export orientation. [...]
Mark Schmitt patiently and temperately explains why nobody should pay attention to Ron Brownstein:
Divide and Concur - Mark Schmitt: [Brownstein] locates the explanation for all of America's problems in the fact that both major political parties equally fail to "set boundaries on their competition" and refuse to compromise [...]
Josh Marshall makes a very good point: much lf the enthusiasm for "fixing" Social Security (rather than tackling any of the much more serious long-run fiscal problems we have that the Bush administration has done so much to worsen) springs from the fact that "fixing" Social Security by raising the [...]
I wouldn't have done it. I would have kept the FF rate at 4.75% and dropped the discount rate to 4.75%. But it is a marginal change...
Eoin Callan, Michael Mackenzie, and Daniel Pimlott report for the Financial Times:
FT.com / World - Fed cuts rates by another quarter point: [...]
Hoisted from Comments: Tjallen writes, apropos of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: About [130] million years ago, there was the Brontothropic principle....
The fundamental constants of the universe must be such to allow the Brontosaurus to live and thrive
[...]
Three of the five elevators here in U.C. Berkeley's Evans Hall have been out of operation for... it seems like an eternity.
There are consequences:
It is Halloween.
Princeton University Press is sending me Walter Lippman, Liberty and the News; Arthur Schlesinger, The Politics of Hope; and Arthur Schlesinger, The Bitter Heritage
I am afraid. Very afraid.
I have work to do today.
(A) One-Sentence Identifications: Briefly state the importance of each of the following people/places/things/concepts for American economic history (40 pts):
Henry Ford; Crash of 1929; New Deal; Bretton Woods; Gold Standard; General Motors; Jim Crow; National Industrial Recovery Act; National Labor Relations Act; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Plessy v. Ferguson; [...]
Tyler Cowen (where does he ever find the time?) alerts me that the extremely sharp, thoughtful, and witty Clive Crook now has a weblog.
Jeebus. I am in trouble. I used to think that the fact that I was early into an expanding arena meant that for a long time [...]
It's the U.S. press corps that has done it!
[angrybear.blogspot.com] Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corp – Rudy’s Battle with the Truth Over Prostate Cancer: Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray write without further comment:
In the radio spot, Giuliani mentions his battle with prostate cancer [...]
Alex Tabbarrok writes:
Marginal Revolution: Assorted Links: The Impact of Milton Friedman on Modern Monetary Economics. A nice review by Edward Nelson and Anna Schwartz of Friedman's thought and influence over monetary policy that also, in the author's words, sets the record straight on Paul Krugman's 'Who was Milton [...]
Matthew Yglesias writes:
Matthew Yglesias: [T]he aggregate audience for blog commentary is enormously larger than it was a few years ago, so it's quite possible that there are people reading this blog right now who have never heard of the classic[s]...
So here are five of the most classic classics:
Daniel [...]
I think Paul Krugman is wrong--or at least incomplete. He argues:
The awful truth, and the better future: [T]he simplicity of the story is almost embarrassing: American politics changed [and turned] because Southern whites started voting Republican after the civil rights movement.
To give you a sense of [...]
Ronald Reagan, in his own words, October 27, 1964:
Ronald Reagan-A Time for Choosing: [T]hey use terms like the "Great Society," or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a "greater government activity in the affairs of the people." But they have [...]
Lawrence Hall is the name of a building (the Lawrence Hall of Science) and a professor (Lawrence Hall of Physics). The second came to the Berkeley Monday Faculty Lunch Forum to argue that there is empirical content to the Anthropic Cosmological Principle.
What is this principle? Put it this way. Suppose [...]
Now that health care reform is heating up again, I want to be reminded of what I thought back in another decade far, far away. It's also worth noting that there are two different critiques of the Higher Broderism:
The first is that David Broder is not doing his job as [...]
Very much worth listening to:
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that I would never have heard of them had I not, bored, picked up the Elvis Costello "Music that Matters to Me" CD at Starbucks.
I think Larry Summers has the rhetoric wrong. The right things for reality-based political economists to be saying right now are:
To the U.S. Congress: a rapidly-growing China that views the U.S. as a helping friend rather than an enemy is an enormous source of strength and wealth; the overall U.S. [...]
Brad Setser writes:
The balance of financial terror, circa August 9, 2007: Back in early 2004, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers highlighted... [the fact that] China – and others – relied on the US for demand that their economies were not generating internally, and the US depended on [...]
He writes:
Paul Krugman: The new Joint Economic Committee report on subprime is, aside from its policy moral, a great source document for facts about the housing bubble, illustrating some key facts about what happened, where, and when. I thought it might be interesting to readers if I gave [...]
From Econobrowser:
Dollar price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate divided by the CPI.
Econbrowser: $90 a barrel: Is it time to start worrying about the oil price shock of 2007?: Oil shocks in 1973, 1979, and 1990 were each followed by a recession. But we saw [...]
Mark Kleiman writes:
The Reality-Based Community: Making progress backwards: If you're my age — that is, if your childhood reading included books such as Our Friend the Atom — one of the things you've always known is that all energy problems are transient, since eventually we will learn how [...]
Yglesias writes, apropos of Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal:
Matthew Yglesias: [T]he book deals with the big picture of American politics over the decades, focusing on broad macro trends in the economy and the political system rather than campaign tactics or the controversies of the day. He puts [...]
Daring Fireball's take:
Daring Fireball: I Believe in Murphy's Law: Here’s how I recommend installing major new OS releases.... First, make a complete backup of your current boot volume to an external FireWire drive.... Next, boot from your external backup volume to make sure that it works. What you [...]
Why oh why can't we have a press corps that uses google? Lawyers, Guns, and Money is really, really angry at the New York Times and Gail Collins:
Lawyers, Guns and Money: Gail Collins: There To Make MoDo and Bobo Look Smart: I forgot to blog about this on [...]
HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt is in trouble after acting as Bush's enforcer on the SCHIP veto, crossing not only Democrats and independents but the sane Republicans: senators like:
Alexander (R-TN), Bond (R-MO), Coleman (R-MN), Collins (R-ME), Corker (R-TN), Domenici (R-NM), Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Hutchison (R-TX), Lieberman (ID-CT), Lugar (R-IN), [...]
An interesting fact:
Market Movers by Felix Salmon: Apple's market capitalization, @ $186.55/share: $162.23 billion. IBM's market capitalization, @ $114.00/share: $157.32 billion...
