Economics Roundtable
Database Maintenance
Over the July 4 holiday, scheduled database maintenance will likely produce some odd reposts as the database resynchonizes to the various blog formats.
Thinking About Jobs
Jeff Frankel lays out a balanced view of the current employment statistics.
Last Month: Jeff Frankel says that the labor market has NOT yet signalled a turning point. Check the graph of weekly hours at the bottom of the page.
Clive Granger, 1934-2009
We have lost an original thinker of the first magnitude. Clive W. J. Granger.
Auctions and Politicians
Catch up on the background for one of the newest areas of Economics Engineering.
The Clark Medal: A Hindcast
David Warsh identifies the likely winners of the John Bates Clark Medal for even-numbered years. The award has, of course, been announced only in odd-numbered years. Who did we miss?
Why Card Issuers Engage In Rate-Jacking
Adam Levitin of Credit Slips explains another "benefit" of securitization. The economics of this market structure are stunningly bad.
The Geithner Plan
Will it work? Paul Krugman says no.
The New York Times'
Room for Debate
includes Simon Johnson, Brad DeLong, and Mark Toma.
Equilibrium and Meltdown
George Waters addresses the economic crisis and the state of macroeconomics.
Gzing! Gzing! Gzing!
David Warsh offers a fascinating account of the invention of earmarks. Catch his review of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, by Robert G. Kaiser.
Monetary Policy in Three Steps
Step 1: Buy private assets from banks while selling Treasuries, effectively trading private assets for Treasuries, leaving reserves with the Fed unchanged.
Step 2: Buy private assets from banks, paying with deposits with the Fed (new money) because the portfolio of Treasuries is shrinking. Banks make little attempt to convert deposits with the Fed into loans. Nothing much happens to loans and the money supply, but excess reserves explode.
Step 3: Banks start to expand loans on the basis of massive excess reserves. The Fed has to drain hundreds of billions in excess reserves to regain control of the money supply. The Fed does this by selling private assets back to the banks.
We are now well into Step 2. Step 3 should be interesting.
Why AIG was in the CDS Business
Felix Salmon explains how taxpayers get to pay the claims after AIG collected the premiums. It is really very simple.
VoxEU -- Free Online Book
Rescuing our jobs and savings: What G7/8 leaders can do to solve the global credit crisis -- Contents Page
Richard Baldwin, Barry Eichengreen
"Without rapid and coordinated action by G7/8 leaders, this financial crisis could turn into a jobs crisis, a pension crisis and much more. This column introduces a collection of essays by leading economists on what the G7/8 leaders should do this weekend. The dozen essays present a remarkable consensus on a few points: we need immediate, coordinated global action that includes recapitalisation of the banks."
Economic Principals
Congratulations to David Warsh on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of EP.
The First Global Financial Crisis
of the 21st Century
A VoxEU.org Publication
Edited by Andrew Felton and Carmen Reinhart
Read the announcement
and/or download selected chapters.
Review: the topic itself is important, but this book also marks a new direction for online discussion.
Great Articles by Famous Economists
The Library of Economics and Liberty includes The Concise Encyclopeida of Economics. To see how many well-known economists have contributed browse by category .
EconModel
The Economics Roundtable is sponsored by EconModel.
The Classic Economic Models cover micro, macro, and financial markets.
Market Power (Phil Miller)
"Selected Musings by an Academic Economist on the Power of Markets”
Marginal product is the additional "output," however measured, when some input is added to the production process, holding all other inputs constant in their usage. "Uncle John" at Tigerboard has a post that indicates he understands the meaning of marginal product in team sports:
Ironman comments on Mizzou's ranking regarding potential NCAA busts.
Phil Miller is happy that Mizzou ranks low in a new poll based on the likelihood of the school's athletic programs being sanctioned for NCAA rule violations, which is based on odds set by online gambling siteWal Mart backs political plans for mandated employer-paid health care insurance. A few quick thoughts:
The article notes that this may be Wal Mart management realizing that the federal government is going to do something regarding health care, and this may be a "choose between two evils" kind of support. ...Like many people, I am sick of the macabre media coverage of Michael Jackson's death. I am much more interested in the late Jackson's immense talent and the effect he had on the music and dance scene. In keeping with that theme, here is a WSJ story about the ...
DeMaurice Smith, the new head of the NFLPA, is educating NFL players about the business side of the game. I'll take a stab at a few questions without doing going to Google or any other source.
“How many people here know the National Football League is ...
...Across the bay, Stanford ticket director Rich Muschell couldn't help but take a ...
One man's fight with ALS and his quest to get a drug to fight it.
Insurance companies typically do not pay for drugs that are part of a not-quite-finished scientific process. But even affluent families like the Thompsons find themselves pleading simply for the right to buy a drug, with ...
"Jackson Popularized Celebrity Ads." Not only was he famous for blazing his hair during a shoot for a Pepsi ad, his making that ad blazed trails for other celebrity pitches for popular products.