Economics Roundtable
The Problem - II
Calculated Risk adds the the clearest picture of the housing tailspin.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
The Problem - I
Calculated Risk has the clearest picture of the problem we face.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Special Topic 8/4/10
This week, the Roundtable will feature a special listing for reaction to the payroll employment figures from ADP on Wednesday and the BLS on Friday.
ADP: +42,000
BLS: -131,000/+71,000
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Special Topics 6/28/10
This week, the Roundtable will feature special listings for reaction to Wednesday's
CBO budget projections and the
payroll employment figures
from ADP on Wednesday and the BLS on Friday.
ADP: +13,000
BLS: -125,000/+83,000
CBO: Take your pick.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Current Economic Conditions 6/5/10
James Hamilton summarizes the situation.
EconModel
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- Recent Entries
KARL CASE, he of the Case-Shiller home price index, has written an op-ed that seems calculated to reassure those thinking of buying a home. It closes:
This financial crisis has made us all too aware that we live in a Catch-22 world: the performance of the housing market drives ...
Amy Davidson has a good round-up of the tragic bank run at Kabul Bank, which is threatening not only the largest and most important bank in Afghanistan but also what remains of that country’s shattered political economy. But you can pretty much learn everything you need to know ...
This essay by Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi reminds (my vanity speaking, I realize) of what I believe is the very first blog post that I ever wrote.
Today’s breathless discussion about wealthy people supporting free-market and classical-liberal causes reminds me that, if I’ve sold my soul or my intellect, I’ve yet to be paid.
...In 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman, the first portable music player. It weighed 14 ounces and cost $200. It could play a cassette that could hold about 90 minutes of music. It was a little bigger than a cassette. It was pretty ugly.
A new nano from Apple was announced ...
In this excerpt from my interview with historian David Kennedy, I asked him to discuss the standard view that Hoover’s ideology tied his hands and kept him from attacking the Great Depression while Roosevelt was an economic wizard. In his answer, Kennedy discusses how activist Hoover was, though ...
Image: iamkennard/Twitpic
Gunman James J. Lee was shot by police yesterday after taking hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters near Washington, DC. After a four-hour standoff and negotiations, police killed Lee, who had a bomb and looked ...
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbronr Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets, by John McMillanThinking Strategically, by Avinash Dixit and Barry NalebuffCapitalism and Freedom, by Milton FriedmanEquality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, by Arthur ...
I am not an expert on the politics –- I do think a carbon tax should be put in place. When the government raises a lot of money people get concerned about politically favored causes being what gets funded and we saw with the House energy bill that funding for ...
Does it matter who controls the businesses of the country? Does it matter who regulates the businesses of the economy? Should these people be smart or dumb?
One cost of the meddling that the Fed and Treasury have done through the bailouts is that dumb people are left in place. People ...
Seasonally-adjusted first time jobless claims were announced on 2 September 2010 to be 472,000. Which was down some 6,000 from the previous week's revised total of new initial unemployment insurance claims of 478,000, which itself was down from the 504,000 filings of two weeks ago.
You might ...
The Pending Home Sales Index ... rose 5.2 percent to 79.4 based on contracts signed in July from a downwardly revised 75.5 in June, but remains 19.1 percent below July 2009 when it was 98.1. The data reflects contracts and not closings, ...
CONCERN that Greece's debt crisis might presage similar episodes elsewhere in the euro zone has not disappeared, despite a €750 billion ($990 billion) backstop agreed in May 2010 in concert with the IMF. ...
Jobless claims fell slightly last week, dropping by 6,000. That's good news. The trouble is that we're still at an elevated 472,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis. One data point doesn't say much, of course. What does the longer-term trend show? Lots of volatility recently, but nothing much has ...
1. What is the probability of Labour winning under your preferred candidate, relative to the probability under your second preference?
2. How much superior would be a government under your preferred leader to that ...
Rothbard shows that Gresham's law was introduced not by Sir Thomas Gresham but by the "arrogant, boorish, and feisty" Sir Thomas Smith the Elder (1513–1577), a bitter critic of debasement who was exiled from the court in 1549. He fought back with ...
What happens to the price of hotels in Rome when the Pope dies? The market experiences shock that, in macroeconomic terms, would seem to destabilize the system. Still, with careful planning, the market manages just fine.
Regarding the media frenzy about the "Ground-Zero Mosque," Ryan Long asks: if the land surrounding the World Trade Center is so sacrosanct for some Americans, why haven't they purchased it themselves? ...
Eleanor Laise has found an interesting trend in the world of quant funds: a lot of them are looking much more human, these days.
Quants are seeking to win back investors not just with their characteristic number crunching but also with a bit of soul searching. Many of the funds’ ...
Here are two videos (one long–45 minutes, one vey short–under two minutes) that make me feel glad to be alive and inspire me. The first is the incredible documentary on the quest of Andrew Wiles to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem (HT: Alex Tabarrok). I watched it last night (third ...
Austin Nichols, 30, an actor on “One Tree Hill,” which is taped in Wilmington, said he had shot a scene in the morning but had gotten off in time to get some surfing in.
“I think hurricanes should have menacing names like, ‘Hurricane Edward Scissorhands,’” he said. “Hurricane Earl sounds like ...
Time: 7:45 AM--11.75 hours until kickoff, Thursday, 9/2/2010
Place: Parking lot, Agricultural Administration Building, The Ohio State University campus
Occasion: Ohio State vs. Marshall, 7:30 PM
The latest Intuit poll on small business employment suggests that hiring in small businesses has, once again cooled off. While there were some gains earlier ...
Over the years, I've said many of these things to people who ask why ...
The Tax Foundation has put up a 10-question quiz for users to test their knowledge of the Bush tax cuts and what President Obama is proposing to do about them.
Here's a sample:
The federal estate tax rate for 2010 is currently zero. If the Bush tax cuts were to expire, ...
In the week ending Aug. 28, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 472,000, a decrease of 6,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 478,000. The 4-week moving average was 485,500, a decrease of 2,500 from the previous ...
Click arrow above to watch Dr. Hal Scherz's "video for doctors" above from Docs4PatientCare. See his editorial in yesterday's WSJ ...
By Peter Boone and Simon Johnson
Is the global economic recovery still on track? The mainstream view is: yes, without a doubt. But increasingly, there are increasingly reasons to fear another financial disruption – particularly given the latest developments in Ireland.
The consensus among officials and most of the international banking community ...
The chart at left, for example, shows by size the percentage of ...
It used to be that daily mental activity was seen as a free lunch in terms of helping to delay dementia. This certainly has an intuitive appeal: exercising your brain will keep it healthy. It also sort of seems fair, in a way, that those who use their brains the ...
Some time ago there was a blogospheric debate about whether a house should be considered an investment. I contended that almost necessarily it has a large investment component, and should be thought of as such. In addition, for many people -although I don’t know how many- housing can be a ...
Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). The Gates Foundation certainly spent a lot ...
Manufacturing activity turned up again last month, the Institute for Supply Management reported yesterday, offering the first statistical review of August's economic profile. The crowd was pleased: stocks soared and bond prices fell. But the bigger test of the trend in August comes tomorrow, when the government's payrolls report ...
Chris, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Why does the corporate world use language so inefficiently? Why turn a simple thing like "talking to a client about their needs" into a five-step process (distinguished, no doubt, by an acronym)? Do companies think that they create net value when they brand ...
Karl Case says the American dream is still alive:
A Dream House After All, by Karl Case, Commentary, NY Times: If you read the coverage of the latest figures on the sales of existing homes..., you may well have come to the conclusion that the American dream is dead. It ...
Market commentators are telling us that the financial crisis is over, but how does this square with the observation that eurozone bond spreads are close to their all-time peaks? In the case Ireland, the spread reached 357bp, the highest level ever, while the Spanish 10-year spread is now 192bp ...
Adam Levitin and Susan Wachter have a new paper out which reckons it can explain the entire housing bubble by looking at the supply of private-label mortgage-backed securities in the market, and the information asymmetries embedded in them.
They do have a point: since the banks putting together these private-lable ...
Our distant ancestors had a biological constitution awfully similar to our own, and, like us, only 24 hours in a day. Arguably the main reason we have so much better lives than them is that we have better ways of doing things, broadly conceived. Consequently, it makes a great deal ...
If one wants to be taken seriously in the world of policy analysis, one should at least use an internally consistent framework. This consideration, apparently, has not troubled Mr. Reidl.
Last week, Katie proposed that we might have a blog category for "Beyond the Comfort Zone." I'll add another new category: "Things Bob Does Not Understand." It's sure to have lots of entries. Here is what I don't understand today.
2. Kansas Taxes in August $38M More Than Expected
by Mario Rizzo
Today is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Social Security.
Only an unreconstructed reactionary (that is, a classical liberal) would, at this late date, be opposed to Social Security Act of 1935.
My purpose here is not to go over that issue, however. It is to comment on a recent ...
by Mario Rizzo
Richard Ebeling, as usual, does an excellent job of showing how the inability to see macroeconomic phenomena as the outcome of complex micro-processes leads to poor policy prescriptions. Take a look at his response, at EconomicPolicyJournal.com edited by Richard Wenzel, to a post by Tyler Cowen ...
by Gene Callahan
Or at least all students of Descartes works. My situation:
I am trying to write a review of Vernon Smith’s Rationality in Economics. (No easy task: I think I’m going to have to read a book on auctions in the process.) In any case, I came across him quoting ...
by Chidem Kurdas
China is expected to produce more than Japan this year, thereby becoming the world’s second largest economy after the US. Chinese annual output is only $5 trillion compared to American $15 trillion and per person income is only a fraction of the US, but it is clear ...
by Gene Callahan
I was recently in a conversation with a very bright economist who declared “We are in agreement about the basic historical facts here; we are just interpreting them differently.”
This is a common but very damaging misunderstanding of historical knowledge: that there are a set of “basic facts” that ...
By Chidem Kurdas
In the first inning of what looks to be an intricate political game, the Obama administration and its financial industry allies suggested that the economy needs the federal government full force in the mortgage market.
The case was pithily made by bond honcho Bill Gross, who oversees more ...
by Jerry O’Driscoll
The AP reports today that sales of existing homes plunged 27 percent, despite the lowest mortgage interest rates in history. How could this happen?
Part of the Obama stimulus package was a tax credit for homeowners who purchased homes within a stated time frame. The credit has ...
by Mario Rizzo
I have been involved in teaching a course in classical liberalism at NYU for almost two decades. For most of this time I have taught an Honors Seminar for first-semester freshmen. More recently, I have been teaching a version for NYU law students (now cross-listed ...
by Mario Rizzo
Professor and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke did not predict the financial mess and subsequent “Great Recession” — at all, never mind the extent of each.
So now he is charged with predicting where the economy is going and how to prevent or ameliorate further deterioration of the lackluster “jobless” ...
by Chidem Kurdas
Some 829 commercial banks are at risk of failure, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. This year 118 banks already failed and were taken over by the FDIC. At this rate, more banks will fail in 2010 than in 2009. If bank regulators were a commercial ...
By Simon Johnson
At one level, the pursuit of higher and more robust capital requirements for banks is not going well. The US Treasury insisted, throughout the year-long financial reform debate, that capital should be the focus – increasing the loss-absorbing buffers that banks must carry – and that they ...
By James Kwak
It’s been widely noted that financial reform is now entering a new phase as the action moves from Congress to the regulatory agencies that will write the hundreds of rules necessary to implement the reforms. During the congressional fight, the financial sector had a huge advantage in money ...
By James Kwak
Ezra Klein makes an important point about our nation’s health care problem: it’s not just a government deficit problem. The underlying problem is that health care costs are not only growing faster than prices (inflation), but also faster than GDP (economic growth), and as a result ...
By Simon Johnson
Most of the discussion of federal budget issues today is misdirected. The shorter run issues are dominated by the likelihood of another financial crisis – and the implications that would have for the budget deficit – but no “fiscal hawks” even want to acknowledge the issue. It is ...
Former Secretary of State George Shultz famously quipped about Washington: “Nothing ever gets settled in this town. You have to keep fighting, every inch of the way.” This is proving just as true for banking reform as for other aspects of American ...
By Simon Johnson and James Kwak
During this hot summer of fitful economic growth, high unemployment and an oil slick visible from space, Washington is obsessed with…deficits. The resurgence of this periodic fascination is not entirely surprising, given our historically large current deficits. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the 2010 ...
By James Kwak
A couple of weeks ago, Planet Money did a podcast based on a game of Monopoly. One of the participants was Russell Roberts, who professes to hate monopoly because it teaches the wrong lessons about business and the economy. At one point, Roberts said he would ...
By James Kwak
So, I wanted to transfer phone and DSL from one house to another. I went to Verizon’s web site, clicked on the promisingly named “Moving to a New Home” link, and walked through the step-by-step wizard. It said I could have unlimited domestic calling and 3 MB DSL ...
By James Kwak
Two people forwarded me Johann Hari’s Huffington Post article about management consultants, provocatively titled “The Great Management Consultancy Scam — and How it Could Be Coming for Your Job.” It seems that someone is once again bashing management consultants as witch doctors and scam artists, and I, ...
By Simon Johnson
The Brown-Kaufman SAFE Banking Amendment proposed a hard size cap on our largest banks, limiting their assets to a very small fraction of the size of our economy. The premise was simple – and could fit on a bumper sticker (or in a campaign flyer for November) – ...
By James Kwak
“Housing Fades as a Means to Build Wealth, Analysts Say.” That’s the title of a New York Times article by David Streitfeld. Here’s most of the lead:
“Many real estate experts now believe that home ownership will never again yield rewards like those enjoyed in ...
By Simon Johnson. My testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on these issues is available here: http://baselinescenario.com/2010/08/05/its-hard-to
-take-the-fiscal-hawks-seriously/.
There are three main views of the financial crisis and recession of 2008-9. In the first two views, the debate over the fiscal deficit is quite separate from what happened in the crisis. ...
It appears that Simon beat me to commenting on Third World America, Arianna Huffington’s bleak portrait of many of the things that are wrong with America (crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, extreme inequality, low social mobility, political system captured by special interests, etc.), so I’ll confine myself to a ...
This guest post is by Ilya Podolyako, member of the Yale Law School Class of 2009 and a friend of mine. Ilya led the Progressive Economic Policy reading group with me and served as an adjunct professor of law at DePaul University this past spring.
One of the key provisions of ...
By James Kwak
Hedge fund managers may be good at investing money. (Or they may just be the beneficiaries of luck, like successful stock mutual fund managers.) But that doesn’t mean they can think clearly.
Andrew Ross Sorkin comments on the letter by fund manager Daniel Loeb, a former Democratic ...
Cruise entertainment doesn't have the best of reputations, but I took my maiden voyage earlier this year and it was a real eye-opener. I was there to review shows on board the Celebrity Eclipse, and both the productions and facilities were extremely impressive. The theatre itself was ...
A recent Gallup Poll shows U.S. Consumers Pulling Back on ...
Kevin Drum stresses the very sound point that even if part of current unemployment is structural, we should stimulate to get rid of the part which is cyclical. I don't have a serious disagreement and choose to debate his guess as to the level of structural ...
I'm spending today writing a review of Caren Grown and Imraan Valodia's new book Taxation and Gender Equity.The review is for the journal Feminist Economics, but I'll give you an uncensored sneak preview of the good bits here.
Vertical equity is a standard concept in taxation: people with a ...
I started my day on the University of Washington campus. I met some bums and I had a good talk with
There is a lot of ill-informed offshore commentary about Australian house price inflation, with anecdotal reports suggesting that some hedge funds are putting on trades designed to capitalise on what they see as an inevitable Australian house price bust.
We have heard all this before from a local debate about ...
Here's a summary of:
Christina Romer’s Farewell Address
I also explain one reason I'm so furstrated with fiscal policymakers.
As WTO trade talks languish, what’s driving the surge in regional trade agreements? This column says that regionalism is being driven in large part by the domino effect, in which nations excluded from a trade agreement launch their own negotiations to redress trade diversion. ...
Back in April, I noted with respect to Greece that “the bear case is terrifying, and the bull case is very hard to articulate”. So it’s extremely useful to have a clearly-articulated paper from the IMF, entitled “Default in Today’s Advanced Economies: Unnecessary, Undesirable, and Unlikely”, which puts the ...
Click here for a printer-friendly version of this article
e21’s last editorial on Social Security reviewed some analytical mistakes commonly committed by opponents of Social Security reform. Such mistakes include both implausible ...
I’ve never really written about a large-scale report before, but I was recently sent a report from The Economists’ Intelligence Unit entitled “Women’s Economic Opportunity”. I’m not sure if it is online, so I don’t have a direct link to it…but I will update with a link when ...
Karl has a post today arguing that Brian Wesbury is wrong for taking the view that fiscal stimulus is not effective (indeed harmful!) for two reasons: 1) that it pushes up interest rates through government borrowing (crowding out), and 2) people will expect future taxes to pay for ...
The policies the current caretaker government would like to emulate:
When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy. Other than that, it was a screaming success.
From the American Bankruptcy Institute: August Consumer Bankruptcy Filings fall 8 Percent this Month
The 127,028 consumer bankruptcies filed in August represented a 8 percent decrease nationwide over the ...
TODAY'S recommended economics writing:
• Political impediments to rapid recovery (Matthew Yglesias)
• Why America isn't working (Project Syndicate)
• The Great Depression in economic memory (Project Syndicate)
• The cyclical, structural unemployment problem (Washington Independent)
• The dynamic properties of New Keynesian models (Mark Thoma)
Pollution trends – here and here. (And I know that, for at least some pollutants, the trends were also downward – that is, good – prior to 1970.) (HT Ross Kaminsky)
Here is a five minute excerpt from my interview with David Kennedy. He compares Hoover and Roosevelt’s economic policies in response to the Great Depression. His answer surprised me.
And please let me know in the comments if I should do these shorter excerpts more often.
...As a follow-up to the post below this one on the usefulness of modern macroeconomic modes, here's Tom Sargent. Given my remarks below, I was pleased to read this:
The criticism of real business cycle models and their close cousins, the so-called New Keynesian models, is misdirected and reflects a ...
“On the Olympics she was telling me it was an enormous opportunity. Think of the impact on our young people, on fitness, on sport, on the country’s self belief. I would say, ‘Yes, but suppose we get beaten, and what’s worse, we get beaten by the French and I end ...
When we last checked in with the monthly consumer price index, headline inflation was running at an annualized 1.2% pace as of this past July, off sharply from 2.7% in January, the Labor Department reported. Clearly, the trend so far this year is down. The question is whether we’re ...
Some Netflix skeptics have been honest enough to admit their errors. In October 2006, Jim Cramer memorably donned sackcloth and ate a piece of a hat with the stock symbol NFLX on it. His sin: He told his viewers to sell ...
Bob Rubin and Julian Robertson have clearly come to the happy conclusion that, having lived through the first eight months of the year, both of them are likely to survive well into 2011 and beyond. But they want to tax their fellow plutocrats who aren’t so lucky, by bringing ...
More old stuff for you to read, while I work on beginning of the semester duties
FRIDAY, MARCH 14, 2008
Some of my fellow bloggers have been looking at inflation expectations and are worried that the Fed is pumping too much cash.
I am skeptical. ...
Really quickly, this Brian Westbury quote is brilliant because it is so perfectly, delectably wrong. Its the kind of thing you dream a student will say so that you correct the entire class’s misunderstandings in one fell swoop.
Money for stimulus programs has to come from somewhere and he ...
Both theory and data suggest that lower real rates cannot account for more than one-fifth of the boom in house prices.
That's from Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb, and Joseph Gyourko; here is more. Here is some of the theory:
If people expect to move in the future, low interest rates ...
Today’s Apple announcement revolved around the iPod Touch 4, a new line of redesigned iPods, iOS 4, and more (see the NYT’s complete liveblog here.)
Apple, aside perhaps from its Apple TV, is once again leading the ...
AidWatch received the following statement from CARE regarding Till Bruckner’s AidWatch post on USAID and NGO transparency:
Statement from CARE (Aug. 30, 2010):
Contrary to what Till Bruckner suggested in a recent blog, CARE did not withhold information in response to ...
New York's cigarette tax of $4.35 (raised this year from the already-high $2.75) is sufficiently high relative to its neighbors to induce schemes to bring in cigarettes from out-of-state. Determined to overcome this resistance, the state is thinking up new efforts to clamp down on smuggling and illegal sales.
One is ...
INDUSTRIAL production figures from around the world have come out today, and while the modal position seems to be slower contraction, a few real positives stand out. One, curiously, is the American economy, where economic activity grew at a faster pace in August than in July, and certainly faster ...
CHRISTINA ROMER, prominent academic economist and outgoing head of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, gave her final speech as an administration member today. She pulled no punches:
The Administration understood that the recovery would be difficult precisely because many of the usual drivers of growth were missing. That ...
ANNIE LOWREY directs us to still more interesting new research:
Consistent with the prediction that liquid housing wealth should most influence college enrollment, the estimates show housing equity changes had no effect on enrollment in the 1980s and little effect in the 1990s, but between ...
Though it isn't defensible, it is unsurprising that a lot of people who eschew offers to work at these firms, favoring public sector work instead, imagine that they are making an enormous personal sacrifice by taking government work. The palpable sense of entitlement ...
A Venezuelan politician is offering breast implants as a prize in a raffle to raise funds for his parliamentary election campaign.
"Some people raffle TVs and we decided to offer this. It's an interesting prize and there's a lot of interest," Gustavo Rojas, an opposition candidate for ...
The story of the miners trapped underground in Chile is fascinating. Even with the 4-inch boreholes that have been drilled to supply them with food, water, and electricity, the men are in for quite a challenge for the next several months while a new shaft is drilled for ...
Jean Pisani-Ferry argues that "In extraordinary times, history is, in fact, a better guide than models estimated with data from ordinary times":
The Great Depression in Economic Memory, by Jean Pisani-Ferry, Commentary, Project Syndicate: The dispute that has emerged in the United States and Europe between proponents ...
From MarketWatch: GM August U.S. sales down 24.9% to 185,176 units
General Motors Co. said Wednesday that U.S. sales in August slumped 24.9% to 185,176 vehicles from 246,479 in August 2009.
Note: in August 2009 U.S. light vehicle ...THIS week's interesting economics research:
• Monetary policy after the fall (Charles Bean, Matthias Paustian, Adrian Penalver, and Tim Taylor)
• Modeling inflation after the crisis (James Stock and Mark Watson)
• After the fall (Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart)
• Social ties and fertility at work (Lena Hensvik and ...
First of all, the $700-billion figure that McArdle cites isn't the full 10-year cost of the high-income tax cuts. It's only the revenues that President Obama's upper-income tax proposal would generate. ...
Anyways, I'm tired of hearing tax cuts "cause" deficits, as though ever-increasing spending was some sort of natural law we have no control over.
Does the Fed want to loosen monetary policy? If so, why doesn't it do it?
There are two answers (or at least, two simple answers) to this question:
1. The Fed doesn't want to loosen monetary policy.
2. The Fed wants to loosen monetary policy, but thinks it can't.
I'm trying to come up ...
Chris Coyne
This semester I have the pleasure of teaching the first course in the Austrian field at GMU. The syllabus is posted here. The main texts are Human Action, Man, Economy and State, Individualism and Economic Order, and Competition and Entrepreneurship. These ...
The PSD Blog is going on an end-of-summer hiatus for the next two weeks. While we're away, check out our most popular posts from August if you missed them while at the beach:
A Universal Definition of Small Enterprise: A Procrustean bed for SMEs? Coming Full Circle: Bucket baths at ...JPMorgan to Shut ...
Watauga voters have said 'no' to the quarter-cent sales tax. In a single-issue off-time vote, some 18% of Watauga voters went to the polls, turning down the County Commissioner's referendum 4428 to 2705 in unofficial returns. 7112 voters cast votes between the early voting and today's referendum.
Background post: ...
New Buys:
5/19/2010 Petrobras 7/9/2010 Goldman Sachs Group Inc 8/31/2010 American Electric Power 8/31/2010 Corn Products International 8/31/2010 Zhongpin 8/31/2010 PC Connection 8/31/2010 Stancorp FinancialNew Sales:
8/31/2010 Goldman Sachs Group Inc 8/31/2010 Dominion Energy 8/31/2010 PPL Inc. 8/31/2010 Sempra Power 8/31/2010 Safeway Inc.Rebalancing Buys:
5/19/2010 Ensco International Inc 6/1/2010 Noble Corporation 6/29/2010 Computer Sciences Corp 6/30/2010 Industrias Bachoco 6/30/2010 Northrop Grumman 6/8/2010 Safeway Inc 7/6/2010 National Presto 8/12/2010 Constellation Energy ...Mark your TV calendar: Mark Zandi will be hosting CNBC's "Squawk Box" gabfest this Friday from 7 to 9 a.m. Not coincidentally, the August employment report is due for release at 8:30 a.m. Stay tuned.
At the beginning of August 2010, we used our model of the S&P 500 to make three predictions of where stock prices would go during the month. We predicted:
The level the S&P 500 would average in the early part of the month (1123-1175). The ...Overall construction spending decreased in July.
MARKETS are up this morning on good manufacturing news out of China, but the big story in America is considerably gloomier. The ADP private employment report, which always comes out a few days ahead of the official Labour Department payroll data, showed a decline in private employment of 10,000 ...
I am delighted to announce that, for the second year in a row, CBO has been recognized by the Partnership for Public Service as one of the "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government." We were ranked third among 34 agencies in the small agency category.
The Partnership says that ...
"According to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., young women's median full-time salaries are 8% higher than those of the guys in ...
Despite what its left and right critics say, New Labour was not just a marketing ploy. It ...
It seems now that almost everyone, from journalists to academics to clergy, relies unthinkingly on Marxian doctrines. Their deterministic ideas seem impervious to any argument. Of course, they've never read Ludwig von Mises.
Lew Rockwell explains that government-planned prosperity was only a dream. Massive unemployment and failing industries are the reality. Stimulus is just hitting the snooze button.
The stock market does not work the way most people think, writes Kel Kelly. One commonly held belief is that a stock-market boom is the reflection of a progressing economy. Not so: it mostly reflects money creation.
I’m puzzled by the tack that the WSJ is taking in describing the latest triennial BIS report on FX trading. (Incidentally, neither the WSJ nor the FT actually bothers to link to it, while the NYT/Dealbook doesn’t seem to have covered it at all.)
In any case, the ...
The Daily Beast kicked off this week’s offerings with a slideshow listing “20 Recession-Proof Cities”: the ones with high pay and sustained economic growth. I’m not entirely clear on how to link to any given city on the list, but if you click through you’ll find Harrisburg, Pennsylvania at ...
There's been a striking change of mood in global financial markets since I left for my summer break: now it's the US that everyone is gloomy about, and views of the eurozone's recovery are more upbeat.
But there are two reasons to think that the smart money will sooner or ...
No modern myth dies harder than the familiar claim – today repeated in the Los Angeles Times by one Joan Mortenson – that “It was the massive spending of World War II that finally ended the Depression.”
Between 1941 and 1945 Uncle Sam drew into his military 16 million persons ...
Image: eye of einstein/Flickr
The cinema was one of the Great Depression era’s most popular escapes. Today’s Great Recession, however, is seeing fewer cinema visitors. The reason? An increase in the price of the average movie ticket. ...
Taking a long-delayed lead from other countries, California plans to ban single-use plastic grocery and pharmacy bags starting in 2012, followed by convenience and liquor store bags in 2013. The move will stop Californians from using ...
(H/t Ken Houghton)
Eric Leeper's paper Monetary Science, Fiscal Alchemy∗, also found ungated in the Financial Times: Jackson Hole papers finally available, mentioned Angry Bear in a footnote page 12 in the section on reactions to the lastest CBO report.
American Empire and “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit” (Henry R. Luce); why the generals push back on Gates’ minimal 3% increase in their war machine, ...
I seem to be on a kick the past couple of days wondering whether it's motives or outcomes that matter. Particularly, if greedy, self-interestedgovernment-subsidized profit-mongering by evil big businessaccidently results in social welfare improving environmental outcomes, should we care about the motive?*
More than 100,000 central Ohio households are ...
And, no, it is not this blog.
I received the "Top 25 Hottest Articles" email from Science Direct today for JEEM and REE. Forty-nine out of the 50 articles are in the general area of environmental policy and a big chunk of those are focused on climate change ...
Emergency leaders in Dare County, which includes most of the Outer Banks, warned residents and visitors to be ready for gale-force winds, coastal flooding and heavy surf even if the storm stays offshore. They planned to meet this morning to check the latest forecasts ...
The Refinance Index increased 2.8 percent from the previous week and is at its highest level since May 1, 2009. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 1.8 percent from one week earlier.
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"Refinancing activity ...
Private sector employment decreased by 10,000 from July to August on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report® released today. The estimated change of employment from June to July was revised down slightly, from the previously reported increase of 42,000 to an ...
Image: EatLiver.com
:RALEIGH, N.C.—The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts ...
Credit Slips is a self-proclaimed blog about "credit, finance, and bankruptcy." Much of our discussion herefocuses on consumer credit, which also makes up a large amount of what gets taught in law school courses on "consumer law." Jeff Sovern at St. Johns did a survey on the subject. ...
For some years now, I've been been telling my undergraduates that they will soon need to think of themselves less as employees and more as entrepreneurs. Even if they work for somebody else, they should watch constantly for career opportunities, look for threats, and, most importantly, frequently consider what skills ...
Quarterly Earnings Are Highest in Almost Three Years
Reductions in loan-loss provisions underscored improvement in asset quality indicators during second quarter 2010. The industry’s quarterly earnings of $21.6 billion are ...