Economics Roundtable

However much conviction one brings to the task, it is hard to write with much authority about the issues in the November election in the US until the nominee of the Democratic Party finally emerges. The policy differences between Barack ...

If you believed everything you read in the newspapers, you might think that working Americans had fetched up in a kindler, gentler age in which they could expect to take one encore after another. One recent “Retirement” supplement, headlined ‘”A Longer Goodbye,” describes how “shorter hours, ...

There was not much warning. Some fifty staffers were summoned to their twelfth-floor offices overlooking Boston Common last week and told they were out of a job. Not yet a year old, BostonNow had been a promising giveaway newspaper for commuters, designed ...

 “The Fed is blameless on the property bubble.”

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That was the headline Monday on the Financial Times op-ed page, as Alan Greenspan launched an exculpatory tour of the media last ...

At first glance, the news from Zimbabwe last week seems bleak: armed guards, police squads marching in the streets, army veterans threatening to deploy in defense of a dictator Robert Mugabe, whose 28-year-rule unexpectedly has been threatened by the ballot ...

How did the subprime crisis become so serious? The drop-dead shorthand explanation emerged today when Deborah Solomon of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, in her weekly interview (registration required), asked former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill how some fast-and-loose mortgage ...

In 1983, Charles Freeny Jr., an electrical engineer in Fort Worth, Texas, applied for a patent on an “information manufacturing machine” for producing music tapes, and sheet music and other products in retail stores using digital information. Two years later, Patent No. 4,528,643 “propertized” ...

This was the week that the sub-prime lending debacle turned into a full-blown financial crisis.  Look beyond the Federal Reserve Board’s new $400 billion special lending facility for the holders of mortgage-backed securities that was announced last week; look beyond its bailout ...

Business Week raised a ruckus last December with a cover story on “The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League.” Provosts from eleven public universities in the Midwest wrote to protest sentiments attributed to Harvard University president Drew Faust, who was said to suggest that land-grant universities should compete ...

Economic Principals is traveling and not writing this week.

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