Economics Roundtable

The house price fairy visited me last night. She offered me three choices: she would instantly double all house prices; she would instantly halve all house prices; or she would leave all house prices the same.

"You stupid fairy!" I replied. "Don't you know i already own this house, and I ...

TODAY'S recommended economcis writing:

• Money can buy happiness, but only up to $75,000 (Huffington Post)

• A tale of three states (Economix)

• It's a bad idea to regulate the art market (Felix Salmon)

• Cheng Siwei on China's property bubble (FT beyondbrics)

• Keynes' conference and Morgenthau's dream ...

With the economy stalled and his party’s November electoral chances sagging, President Obama is rolling out a new plan to boost growth—a mix of infrastructure spending and business tax cuts. The tax changes make some sense on their own merits, although I’m not sure how much they’d do to ...

Robert Samuelson points out that since 1971, there has been virtually no change in educational scores in reading and math at the national level. Then he gives some very useful facts to remember:

Standard theories don’t explain this meager progress. Too few teachers? Not really. From 1970 to 2008, the ...

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells writing in the New York Review of Books (HT: Brad DeLong) criticize Raghuram Rajan for believing that government policy bears a lot of responsibility for the housing crisis:

In the world according to Rajan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago business ...

Here’s some evidence that America’s transportation infrastructure isn’t “crumbling.”  (HT Aaron Merrill)

Note to the commentors who accuse me of being a mindless ideologue: because nearly all of what most people think of as “infrastructure” (things such as roads, bridges, harbors) are built and maintained by government, a true mindless ...

Hewlett-Packard filed a lawsuit against former CEO Mark Hurd today. Yesterday, Hurd agreed to join Oracle as co-president. HP claims Hurd is violating his confidentiality agreement and will reveal the HP’s trade secrets to competitor Oracle. The agreement ...

The Obama administration seems poised to do to business investment what the ill-conceived federal policies aimed at helping the auto and housing markets did - incentivize short-term activity at the expense of future sales while failing to improve conditions for the long-term.

Undeterred by the boom and bust experiences of the ...

That’s the title of co-blogger Dennis Coates’ piece in today’s LA Times.  Dennis may be too proud to call attention to himself by pointing that out here, but I’m not!  Here’s the first paragraph:

This week, officials of FIFA, the world soccer federation, will be visiting the United States to ...

EARLIER in the year, as debt worries wracked European financial markets, one might have thought that the expiration of most of the Bush tax cuts was a foregone conclusion. As recently as July, Barack Obama was planning on allowing the cuts for top tax brackets to expire and was hoping ...

Please note the new "Book Store" link at the top of the page. Any and all books discussed on these pages are listed here.

By James Kwak

On my way to and from New Haven, I listen to podcasts, including a lot of TED Talks. Today I listened to a talk by Esther Duflo, the recent winner of the Clark Medal (top economist under forty), from earlier this year. The topic was using ...

What on earth is the point of Hewlett-Packard suing Mark Hurd? The mutual mudslinging has been decidedly unedifying to date, and now it’s certain to get much worse — and to take place in open court, to boot. With a market capitalization of over $90 billion, suing its ...

John Carney today writes about what he calls “the deeper problem” behind the Basel III negotiations: “how regulators can assess capital requirements without a functioning market process”.

Ideally, he says, “we wouldn’t have regulatory capital requirements at all”, and banks would voluntarily raise their capital levels because doing so would ...

In an update to his popular post, which is causing some interesting commentary on Twitter, my co-blogger Karl Smith has this to say:

My argument is no, this isn’t just another bad experience. Its a failure of our most basic institutions and is leading to pure loss.

Indeed, I think ...

I loved this essay-style interview, Dan Klein speaking with William R. Allen, on the glory days of the UCLA economics department, under the leadership of Armen Alchian.

It is taken from the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch,�(I haven't read the other pieces yet).� There is also a ...

There is an alternative, more behavioral hypothesis for the fragility of the securitization market that does not rely on a predominance of short-term debt financing. This alternative hypothesis begins with the observation that a large proportion of ABS tranches—both in the traditional and subprime sectors—were rated AAA. The AAA ...

George Will’s wisdom on self-styled ‘environmentalists‘ and the recent evaluation thereof by Walter Russell Mead.

Check out the highlighted passage in this recent Economist article on Canada’s health-care system. (HT my friend from Toronto Ed Barr)

EconLog’s David Henderson on government intervention into health-care markets.

Dear Friends,

This election will be proof positive that public sentiment has shifted towards shrinking the size of the federal government, restoring the Constitution ...

Peter Orszag, who stepped down just as White House budget director just a month ago, appears to have just floated an important trial balloon on a potential Democratic strategy for the Bush tax cuts. It comes in the form of Orszag's debut column for the ...

Headline writers, journalists, and bloggers are in a frenzy today over former OMB Director Peter Orszag's apparent disagreement with his former boss (Pres. Obama) over what to do about the expiring Bush tax cuts. But a closer look at what Orszag wrote in the New York Times today suggests ...

Responding the near-collapse of the Greek economy, forestalled only by a massive bailout from their brethren, the EU’s finance ministers agreed this morning to submit the outlines of their budget plans for approval by the European ...

Will make our lives less worth living until our eventual death anyway.

Paul Krugman complains that its not only the Austerity crowd but the Tight Money crowd that’s switching its tune on the bond markets

So will the OECD call for a drastic shift toward expansionary [monetary] policies, since the ...

Image: Andrew-Hyde/Flickr

I woke up yesterday to a massive plume of smoke stretching across the sky and littering ash in my front yard. I soon found out that the so-called Fourmile Fire, a 3,500-acre brushfire, was wreaking ...

*3:25 mark

HT: Dave Warren via FB

Having just said that "the idea of 'public goods' and the need for government to provide them has been lost in discussions over stimulus spending," I'm glad to see this:

Infrastructure, by Paul Krugman: Some bleary-eyed thoughts from Japan on the reported administration proposal for $50 billion in new spending:

1. ...

THE average senator represents 3,000,000 Americans. But senators are allocated two to each state, which means that Alaskan senators each represent about 350,000 Americans, giving Alaskan residents political influence out of all proportion to their size. In 2005, one of those Alaskan senators, Ted Stevens, nearly succeeded in winning the ...

MARKETS around the world have been a little shaky today, thanks largely to a wave of unnerving news out of Europe. Like:

Banks led stocks lower on concern European lenders will require more capital to compensate for holdings of bonds in the region’s weakest economies. Germany’s banking association said yesterday ...

Mike Spector and Tom McGinty have a big piece in the WSJ looking at the role of hedge funds in bankruptcy negotiations. They’re not fans:

The bankruptcy process was created decades ago as a way to give ailing businesses a chance to heal and creditors a shot at repayment. Hedge ...

Today’s Google.com logo has a special feature: It scatters into multicolored dots when you mouse over it, then rebuilds itself when you keep your cursor away. Google hasn’t yet told anyone why the logo is different ...

|Peter Boettke|

Peter Orszag in the NYT argues that the US is facing a nasty duel deficit problem -- a short run job deficit that is painful, and a budget deficit that is unsustainable in the medium to long run.�

Is this use of language helpful at all? ...

|Peter Boettke|

That saying comes from my brilliant colleague Richard Wagner. �And after close to 25 years in this business I believe Dick's words more than ever. �Student after student over that period have insisted to me that they are working their butt off reading and thinking and ...

THE writers of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page seem to have their own special brand of economics (emphasis below is mine):

The recession preceded Mr. Obama's Inaugural by 13 months, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, and so did the President's fiscal policy ideas. George ...

YESTERDAY, Barack Obama announced proposals for a series of new stimulative measures designed to provide support for a flagging economic recovery. He will detail these proposals in a speech tomorrow, but the broad outlines are already clear.

One aspect of the package will be a focus on infrastructure investment. The ...

Has economics failed?

Yes, judging by the criticism heaped upon the dismal science in recent years. Macroeconomists in particular, we're told, were blind to the rising risks that eventually killed the economic expansion and unleashed the Great Recession—the deepest contraction since the Great Depression in the 1930s. In fact, economics ...

Gideon Rachman of the FT wants to dethrone economists. I am all for it, but what grates in his article is the view that economics as a science is defined by its ability to forecast the future. No, it is not, and whoever said that is ...

There is a critical point that I fear the commentariat is just not getting. In my darker moments I fear that some of my fellow economists aren’t getting it either but we aren’t going to go there.

Look at these two graphs ...

Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy explains that her agency is designing a new and improved fuel-economy label for (mandated) placement on all new cars sold in the U.S. (Letters, Sept. 7).

Taking Ms. McCarthy’s advice, I visited the EPA’s website and examined ...

The good news from the latest National Accounts release is that real GDP has recovered its pre-recession peak. In this post, I'm going to review how the Canadian fell into recession, and how it recovered.

As downturns go, this latest episode wasn't all that bad:

A sun-kissed, low-cost afternoon lured boaters, cyclists, golfers and runners to Triad parks yesterday.

The uncertainty over Hurricane ...

By James Kwak

When last we left our hero, he had just (with some difficulty) placed an order with Comcast because of Verizon’s many system and customer service failures. A friend of mine said that he couldn’t want to see the post I would write about Comcast, which he ...

There are an immense ...

Peter Schiff offers some interesting observations, via Interfluidity.�

But to repeat the impact of World War II today would require a truly massive effort. Replicating the six-fold increase in the federal budget that was seen in the early 1940s would result in a nearly $20 trillion budget today. ...

There should be a betting market in how many of these projects actually end up being finished within, say, the next thirty years:��

But the biggest question mark hovering over the future of high-speed rail in the United States is funding. The $8 billion allocated in the stimulus package is ...

Last time I looked at a proposal to spend $50 billion on infrastructure to stimulate the economy, I thought it was a great idea. This time, I think it’s scarcely worth the bother. Why have I changed my mind?

Last time was in February 2009, and the proposal was ...

Image: SciFiBlog

Definition of Fiscal Space – The difference between the current level of public debt and the level of debt that is sustainable and manageable.

A key issue for many advanced economies is being aware of the level of government borrowing that is sustainable in the long term. Basically, how much can ...

My column from this morning's Roll Call asks two very troubling questions:�

1. Why are some people refusing to hear what the bond market is saying?

2. How is it possible that so many of those who insist the bond market should be ignored now were saying just the opposite before?

There was a surprising development in the latest jobs report - the number of young adults counted as being employed surged during August 2010!

The litigation between Chase and Lehman (10-03266 (JMP)) is heating up, with Chase filing its�motion to dismiss�all of Lehman's claims. While Lehman's claims are many, the ones that are of special interest to me are those fraudulent transfer and preference actions that implicate the "

►Dangerous Defeatism is taking hold among America's economic elites
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard/Telegraph (U.K.)
"Blitz the market with bond purchases, but do so outside the banking system by buying from insurers, pension funds, and the public. This would gain traction on the broad M3 money instead of letting it collapse (yes, ...

Daniel J. Mitchell at Cato continues laying out a strong case.

This study [by Holtz-Eakin and Smith] jumps into�a long-running chicken-or-egg debate in the academic literature about whether higher taxes lead to higher spending or whether higher spending leads to higher taxes. This causality debate is interesting, ...

Be glad you don't live in Detroit, where they're stealing Mayor Bing's and Jesse Jackson's cars.

The post, by the excellent "theblogprof",�also has a lengthy list of Detroit's other woes.

"America's Worst Job Market: What 27.6% Unemployment Looks Like".

"10 Worst Places to Live [in America]". Cheer up, Detroit! You're only third on this list.

This time next week, I’ll be on a plane heading for Beijing, on my way to Tianjin for “Summer Davos”. Or, to give it its proper name, the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2010.

George Osborne has already shown he is a courageous chancellor. But is he also mad? In essence, the fate of Britain's recovery over the next few years depends on the answer to that question.

Harold James:

Recession Geopolitics: ...It is as if China’s leaders were the star pupils in one of Kindleberger’s courses. Throughout the crisis, the Chinese economy continued to grow at an amazing pace, in part as a consequence of massive fiscal stimulus. When anyone wants an example of how effective a ...

Frankfurter Allgemeine has the story that Germany’s banks warn that the passing of Basle 3 would force them to raise over €100bn in new capital. The most important rule is the new leverage ratio, which limits the amount of credit to 33 times the bank’s core ...

I very much hope that Die Zeit is right about the Basel III capital requirements: the numbers being mooted there are definitely at the top end of what anybody expected.

They start with a bare minimum Tier 1 capital requirement of 6%; that’s a substantial increase of 50% over the ...

Soros gives $100 million to Human Rights Watch — NYT

Diamond to be CEO of Barclays — NYT

“He says he can’t decide which is more unbelievable, the fact that there was a horse in the Apple Store, or that he didn’t notice it.” — Chimero

Are “heavy media multitaskers” ...

Just a day after completing the country’s Comprehensive Development Strategy, the expert in charge of Development admitted that he does not actually exist. The expert had done a superb job prioritizing the needs of the poor across 9 major sectors and hundreds of development interventions, not to mention mainstreaming gender ...

By now much virtual ink has been devoted to the “cuts” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposes in the defense budget and defense programs.��These have been treated as a clear statement of intention that DOD will contribute to the overall effort at restraining federal spending, the deficit, and the ...

David Warsh:

Now The Real Work Begins, by David Warsh: ...The experts’ deciphering of the crisis is nearly complete. Now the real work begins.

The best account of what happened,..., still seems to me, as it did in April, is that of Gary Gorton, of Yale University, Slapped by the Invisible ...

Anybody remotely attracted by this must be out of their minds:

The world lacks regulation of art securitization and art funds. With an exception of perhaps only India no country of any significant domestic investment market has a well defined regulatory framework for art funds… Well, as of this summer ...

Paul Krugman (HT: John Papola) calls on history to justify more government spending:

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government ...

Jerry O’Driscoll explains how a competent understanding of the phenomena requires Hayekian thinking.

Q1. Was there much sovereign stress in the European bank stress tests?

NO. The most ...

Paul Krugman draws an analogy between United States in 1937-1940 in his Labor Day column.

A summary: Dr. Krugman depicts 1937 as a year when FDR tried to slash the deficit. Dr. Krugman suggests that stimulus, especially fiscal stimulus, ought to have been applied. Instead, the Roosevelt administration ...

According to news reports, President Obama will use an upcoming speech in Cleveland to announce a proposal to expand and make permanent the R&D tax credit.The tax credit provides businesses with a credit for certain research and experimentation expenditures.These expenditures are generally fully deductible from income, which means that ...

Today, President Obama unveiled his “Plan to Renew and Expand America’s Roads, Railways and Runways.” While the wonk in me was glad to see transportation reform and a few particular policies get some attention, the reality is the Administration used a string of vague, unfunded promises to appeal ...

|Peter Boettke|

I nominally blog at The Economic Way of Thinking, but for the past year the dominant blogger there has been Scott Beaulier. �Scott has done an amazing job applying the economic way of thinking to an amazing array of topics and keeping his readers up-to-date on ...

Andrew, Bruce, Ed, Pete, Troy, and I�are exceptionally pleased and very happy to announce that Gordon Adams, former associate director of the Office of Management and Budget for national security and international affairs and one of the world's experts on the military, foreign affairs, homeland security, and intelligence budgets, has ...

I have an op-ed in today’s SMH arguing that a ‘small Australia’ will not only limit economic progress, but also scientific and cultural creativity:

Like the US, Australia provides an environment in which people and their ideas can flourish. But while the tyranny of distance has receded with advances ...

...According to the CBO.

In evaluating the advisability of extending either completely or partially the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (aka EGTRRA and JGTRRA), and implementing additional fixes to the AMT, one should consider the impact on the budget balance.

by Jerry O’Driscoll  

In the September 4th issue of the Wall Street Journal, Jon Hilsenrath chronicles the debate over the reasons for persistently high unemployment.  What is being described is the problem of heterogeneous labor.

Labor, like capital goods, is specialized and specific to certain occupations. When those occupations disappear in ...

There’s some true silliness this week from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who, in his most recent column, 1938 in 2010, makes this rather bizarre point:

In short, welcome to 1938.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s ...

Bill Black has a detailed round-up of what we know about Kabul Bank, and where the US went wrong. He’s particularly scathing about this quote from Stephen Biddle:

U.S. officials and defense analysts say that challenging local power brokers and criminal syndicates, many of which depend on U.S. ...

If you wanted proof that New Yorkers think of bicyclists more as pedestrians than as vehicles, all you need to do is look at this graphic in the NYT, which shows how Broadway is used between 59th Street and 17th Street. The lanes are labeled with only two ...

Bob Wright often argues that the evolution of life on Earth looks a whole lot like the product of design.

. . .� biologists agree that a strictly physical system or process—whose workings can be wholly explained in material terms—can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair ...

A few weeks ago I blogged about the views of Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and self-described "inflation hawk." Mr. Fisher is an important man; among other things he was ...

The Economist asks:

Should the Bush tax cuts be extended?

Here are the answers, including one from me:

Tom Gallagher Yes, but only for a short period
Michael Bordo Yes, their benefits outweigh their costs
Alberto Alesina Maintain the cuts and reduce spending to trim deficits
Guillermo Calvo Yes, as the ...

THE New York Times has a weird piece today on housing market policy. It reads:

The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.

Over the last 18 ...

TODAY'S recommended economics writing:

• Wage inequality and exports (Vox)

• Retiring Fed official considers more bank action (New York Times)

• A monkey economy as irrational as ours (TED)

• Snapshots of the employment situation, August 2010 (Econbrowser)

• The sad absurdity of our economic debate (New Republic)

•

Megan McArdle doubts that we could have possibly had a stimulus big enough to restore full employment

How much unemployment reduction you get for a given amount of stimulus spending is, obviously, at best an imperfect estimation. But let’s take the CBO’s estimates as representing a rough consensus of ...

Readers Question: Does government increases or decrease economic efficiency. kindly explain as i have tried to look for the reasons.

This is a very open ended question, which raises many different issues. To some, on the political right, it is a simple matter of governments bad, markets good. Others are apt ...

President Obama on Monday is to call for as much as $50 billion in government spending to start up a long-term public works plan emphasizing transportation projects – roads, rail and airport runways – over ...

Here is an anonymous commentator over at Andrew Sullivan, via�Conor Friedersdorf guest-blogging:

1. Business is much more about being organized and managing people than it is about ideas. Past a certain scale, ideas don't seem to matter much (unless you are a once-in-a-lifetime Steve Jobs type visionary). You and ...

In the latest EconTalk, Arnold Kling makes the case that political power is growing more concentrated even as knowledge is getting more dispersed. He argues that this is an unhealthy trend and suggests some ways to make things better. Arnold, as always, has many interest insights.

Bob Higgs explains the wrongheadedness of focusing on consumption as a driver of the economy.  Here are key passages:

As every student of the business cycle learns early on, the most variable part of aggregate expenditure is private investment. When real gross private domestic investment peaked, in the first quarter ...

Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

The presumption is now widely shared that America’s infrastructure is “crumbling” (Letters, Sept. 6).  Frankly, while I hardly believe that infrastructure in the U.S. is in ideal shape, I doubt that its condition is as dire as so many people now think ...

The theoretical case for the potential effect of trade on the distribution of income has a long and distinguished history. It starts with the first musings of David ...

MAYBE I should have asked about an infrastructure spending package sooner:

President Barack Obama is asking Congress to approve at least $50 billion in long-term investments in the nation's roads, railways and runways in a pre-election effort to show he's trying to stimulate the sputtering economy...

While the proposal calls ...

The NZX 50 Index of stocks climbed in Wellington, led by building-related companies. Insurers fell. New Zealand’s dollar rose to 72.41 U.S. cents from 72.07 cents in New York on Sept. 3. The nation’s bonds declined, pushing 10-year yields to their highest in more ...

~Frederic Sautet~

A violent earthquake (magnitude 7.1) struck the city of ...

August was a busy month for America’s railroads, according to the Association for American Railroads. Traffic spiked up, as often happens during the month. More importantly, August traffic was 11% higher than a year ago (the same gain as reported in July):

By James Kwak

Probably the most important and intractable economic problem we face is not restarting the economy after the financial crisis, but the decades-old problem of stagnant wages for the lower and middle classes and the consequent massive increase in income inequality. This is something that Raghuram Rajan brings ...

Arnold Kling of EconLog and author of Unchecked and Unbalanced, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the book and the relationship between knowledge and power. In a modern economy, specialization has increased and knowledge is increasingly dispersed. But political power has become more concentrated ...

Have you ever wondered what Participants experience at Summer Davos?

What are the ...

Have you ever seen a more appealing table of contents?:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Nongoloza and Kilikijan

Chapter 2: The functions of violence I—Making men (and not children)

Chapter 3: The functions of violence II—Making men (and not women)

Chapter 4: Prison on the streets, ...

Dear Mish,

Always look forward to your analysis. One small question. How many living, breathing, frustrated, suffering, hopeless, and poverty ...

Hayek’s remarkable The Road to Serfdom. Here’s the top 100 list. The Road to Serfdom is currently #25.

1938 in 2010, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action ...

The 3-month long attempt to form a government after the most recent Belgian election failed over the weekend, when King Albert accepted the resignation of Elio Di Rupo as mediator – the person in charge to form a government. Mr Di Rupo heads the French-speaking Socialists, who tried to ...

The essence of traditional international trade theory is that poorer countries produce goods and services with resources that they have in abundance, mainly low skilled labor and sometimes natural resources. They export these goods, and import goods from the richer countries that require skilled labor, and considerable physical and financial capital. ...

General strike in Barcelona reportedly has weakened position of the Republican govt.

Premiers of Australian states decided on ...