Economics Roundtable
Job Losses - I
This graph all too clearly illusttrates the current situation.
Job Losses - II
U.S. payroll employment is now almost 300,000 jobs below the worst month in the previous recession.
After a massive downward revision in the past year's payroll employment figures, the total for January 2010 is 129,527,000. The minimum payroll employment in the previous recession was 129,822,00 for August 2003.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
A Positive Number
The revised November change in U.S. payroll employment is +4,000. This is the first positive number since December 2007. Positive is good.
The other side of the coin is that December 2009 payroll employment was 130,910,000. December 1999 payroll employment was 130.532,000. The increase of 378,000 jobs in 10 years is not so good. The labor force increased by 12,882,000 over the same period.
A Troubling Chart
The chart below shows percentage changes in U.S. payroll employment over the previous ten years.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
If payroll employment does not increase for January and February, payroll employment for February 2010 will be less than payroll employment for February 2000.
The chart below shows percentage changes in U.S. payroll employment (blue) and civilian labor force (red) over the previous ten years.
Click on the chart for a larger version.
Good Economics
Bruce Yandle lists the reasons why Cash for Clunkers is a Loser. Among other things, it is the latest example of The Broken Window Fallacy, which was clearly explained by Frederick Bastiat, 1801-1850.
James Hamilton gives a clear explanation of why comparing the level of government debt in 1945 to the projected level of government debt in ten years is not comforting, but is downright scary.
Gregory Mankiw neatly explains the "third factor" consideration in the difference between correlation and causation. Paul Krugman adds a comment, and Mankiw responds.
100%
The Economics Roundtable includes 100% of the Wall Street Journal's Top 25 Economics Blogs plus 120 more.
No Ads!
David Warsh explains why Mark Thoma does not take ads at Economist's View and adds insightful commentary on economics bloggers.
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.
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.
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- Recent Entries
Total credit-card debt outstanding dropped by $93 billion, or almost 10%, over the course of 2009. Is that cause for celebration, and evidence that U.S. households are finally getting their act together when it comes to deleveraging their personal finances? No. A fascinating spreadsheet from CardHub breaks that ...
Pennsylvania State Police have recently taken to armed raids of bars offering an unregulated level of consumer choice:
As in armed raids conducted last week against three Philadelphia taprooms, the State Police alleged that the targeted beers were not properly registered with the state Liquor Control Board for sale in ...
|Peter Boettke|
I did an interview today with Scott Nystrom at Self Directed Investor. It is on their website for roughly the next 24 hours, and then after that will be in their interview archives.
Thanks Scott for the great opportunity.
|Peter Boettke|
I was thinking of something catchy to say, but my sheer joy with the facts of the situation required instead just a straightforward statement --- Chris Coyne has accepted our offer to join the economics faculty here at GMU starting next fall. He will be the "Baldy" ...
Total consumer credit outstanding expanded by $5 billion in January after contracting 15 of the previous 17 months. Consumer credit outstanding includes revolving and nonrevolving credit. Revolving credit is mostly credit card debt, and nonrevolving credit includes loans for items such as vacations, autos, and boats. Even with the ...
Calling himself a realist, Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday scaled back his proposal to raise income taxes, shifting to a call for an increase of just one percentage point to be used solely for preventing deep cuts to education.
The rest of Illinois' ...
Greenspan is scheduled to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early April. This might be the one real opportunity to understand why regulators missed the lending problems.
Hopefully the Commission will ask about regulatory ...
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be the star witness at a hearing of the congressional panel looking into causes of the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the situation.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commissions three-day session in early April gives commission members a rare opportunity to quiz the ...
Occasionally, I have links to Amazon products on this blog. If you click on the link and then buy that product or another product during your click-thru visit, I get a cut of the sale. In other words, I am an Amazon affiliate. It's not very lucrative to me since ...
Via the Freakonomics blog comes this picture of water usage in Edmonton during the Gold Medal game in the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Or, as the newser website quipped "Canada Peed in Unison ...
What to make of BofA’s decision to abolish overdraft fees on debit-card purchases? Josh Duboff says it’s “kind of undeniably great”, James Kwak says it’s a good thing, and the Center for Responsible Lending says that it’s a GOOD thing. Only Kevin Drum spies a ...
by Marshall Auerback
A new book by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, "This Time It's Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Follies", ...
Perhaps the title is arhetorical question, but I felt obliged to ask it after seeing the latest parody of a World Bank initiative. If you've been ignoring CNN, you may have missed thenews that the World Bank Institute recently launched a massively multiplayer game called Evokedesigned ...
Township officials expressed frustration that several unions representing Moorestown government workers have not agreed to reopen contract negotiations.
Last month, township council asked the ...
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls "the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties":
Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
"What Democrats believe," he says "is what textbook economics ...
Solidus Company announced today the formation of a microfund to support local entrepreneurs and to help accelerate the growth of start-ups in the Middle Tennessee area. JumpStart Foundry will ...
I always knew there was some. Who knew there was so much? Guess I'll have to watch more often.
That sound you heard at the end of each period in the US-Canada gold medal game was the giant sucking sound of a multitude of potties being ...
And yet the latest YouGov poll, reflecting the direction of many others, now shows a ...
When it comes to the government's budget plans, we know that Gordon Brown does not always tell it entirely straight. Remember last summer, when he was still refusing to utter the word "cut"? But listening to him today, you have to say he's consistent.
Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside.
With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible.
The rest ...
Bank of America has become the first financial institution to stop overdrafts, not just overdraft fees, from debit cards. That means that the bank won’t let you withdraw more money than you have in your debit-linked bank account. ...
The unemployment rate decreased in nine U.S. states in January and climbed in 30, signaling the thawing of the labor market is not broad-based.
The jobless rate in Michigan ...
Florida's special python hunting season has begun.
From Monday until April 17, anyone with a hunting license who pays for the $26 permit can take them on state-managed lands around the Everglades in South Florida.
Florida officials have taken a more aggressive stance against the invasive species in the past year, creating ...
The Board of Directors of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists is pleased to announce that the site of the next NAAFE Forum will be Honolulu, Hawaii. Forum organizers will be Dr. Pingsun Leung of the University of Hawaii, ...
Okay, here is tonight’s rule:
The assumption of normality for asset price changes is wrong in virtually every financial market setting. The proper distributions are fatter tailed and more negatively skewed.
Normality allows researchers to publish, regardless of the truth.
Normality allows risk managers and regulators to pretend that adequate reserves are ...
In this week's Tax Policy Podcast, Tax Foundation President Scott Hodge interviews Idaho Rep. Marv Hagedorn, who has introduced a tax reform plan to cut the state's personal and corporate income tax rates over 10 years. The bill would eliminate state's seven personal income tax brackets, bringing ...
Mark Perry took a closer look at the most recent series of federal minimum wage hikes and their apparent effect upon teen unemployment levels. Here is the bottom line from his analysis:
Just to be clear on what subordinate ...
See the full interactive graphic.
Thirty states and the District of Columbia recorded unemployment rate increases in January from a month earlier, while states registered rate decreases, the Labor Department said. But in a sign ...
Greeks are bracing for a long and deep recession ahead as it begins to dawn on them that the cost of fixing the country’s public finances will entail years of economic hardship and high unemployment.
In recent public opinion polls, but also in the media, the business community, and even in ...
The global equity market has cast a long influence on regional stock markets in recent years. Whether it was a bull market on steroids or the opposite effect, the gravitational pull of a broad-minded definition of the world’s equity market has been a major force in moving narrower slices of ...
I've recently written some posts on the craft brewing industry relative to the macrobrewers like InBev-owned Anheuser Busch and MillerCoors. While the cheaper macro brews have been hurting as of late, the more expensive craft brews have seen remarkable growth. See here, here, here and here.
Can House Democrats trust the Senate not to foul up a two-bill strategy for health care reform?
No.
While most of the public discussion focuses on the procedural challenges particular to reconciliation, a more important point is being overlooked. The hardest part of ...
Go read CFTC head Gary Gensler’s speech on regulating credit default swaps: it’s by far the best thing written on the subject to date. He’s absolutely right about pretty much everything, and it would be amazing if the Europeans, who seem much keener to start regulating these animals than ...
Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Robert Higgs documents the fact that private investment is drying up in the U.S. – and he explains why. Here’s a key selection:
Unfortunately, while private investment is the engine of economic growth, government spending (despite what generations of Keynesian economists have asserted) is the ...
Here’s the abstract of George Selgin’s excellent new article, “Central Banks as Sources of Financial Instability,” published in The Independent Review:
The present financial crisis shows how central banks can fuel the financial booms that make severe busts possible. Unfortunately, theoretical discussions of central banking badly neglect its role in ...
In this post, I disagreed with Menzie Chinn and argued that CBO estimates of the impactof the stimulus are not estimates. Charles Steele writes in a comment:
CBO’s approach *is* an analysis of what stimulus actually did; such analysis necessarily requires a counterfactual, based on an underlying model of what ...
Google opened the Google Apps Marketplace, where businesses can install and purchase a variety of apps, last night. The beauty of the Google Apps Marketplace (not to be confused with the Andriod store) is that all apps ...
Image: Educate-yourself.org
Seven US states are investigating market abuse by seed giant Monsanto. Attorneys general in Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Iowa, Illinois, and two more states are investigating Monsanto’s competitive practices. The US Justice Department is also ...
|Peter Boettke|
As a parent, and also as a coach working with young men for the past few decades, I have tried to always preach the values taught to me by my parents and the coaches/teachers that I admired growing up and in college. One of the wisdoms ...
Teaching Philosophy:
John Whitehead does the best that he can in the classroom.
Five years after the need for a cleanup was recognized by the state legislature, the state Environmental Management Commission is hammering out a strategy to ...
Lots of people, especially those trying to battle high utility bills, believe in energy-efficient homebuilding.
But there's something holding green technology back: It simply costs more to include it than it adds to resale value.
Appraisals for newly built green homes do not fully reflect the cost of green technology, ...
North Carolina's teachers and state employees can expect another year without a pay raise.
Gov. Bev Perdue said that, while salaries will remain flat in the coming budget year, she aims to pay back the 1/2-percent pay cut that state workers and teachers received last year in ...
Our new report on Amazon tax laws has received wide coverage, including from the Associated Press, CNet, CBS, Instapundit, TaxProf, Tax Analysts, the Denver Post, Daily Finance, Affiliate Marketing Blog, CPA Trendlines, the Performance Marketing Association, Tertium Quids,
Thirty states and the District of Columbia recorded over-the-month unemployment rate increases, 9 states registered rate decreases, and 11 states had no rate change, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the year, jobless rates increased in ...
A roundup of economic news from around the Web.
Fed Seats: Mark Thoma asks why so many Fed seats are unfilled. ” For whatever reason, the administration has not taken full advantage of its chance to shape monetary policy during the downturn. The number of open positions is a large ...Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) has responded to the Tax Policy Center'sanalysis ofthe revenue portion of his Roadmap for America's Future. TPC found Ryan'smajortax restructuring would likely raise significantly less revenue than he expected andwould substantiallylower taxes for high-earners. In his response, Ryan suggests he'd be willing to adjust ...
Are you aware that a Federal Reserve dollar bill is not a constitutional dollar? Perhaps you are, but if so, do you know what a constitutional dollar literally is?
For thousands of years under the Old World concept of a static economy operating under bureaucratic control, human beings lived in hunger, filth, and disease. They worked ceaselessly at backbreaking drudgery to keep life in wretched bodies.
When we think of the libertarian tradition, we tend naturally to think of political philosophers and economists of the past. But one part of the libertarian tradition belongs to novelists and other fiction writers.
Can House Democrats trust the Senate not to foul up a two-bill strategy for health care reform?
No.
While most of the public discussion focuses on the procedural challenges particular to reconciliation, a more important point is being overlooked. The hardest part of the Pelosi/Reid strategy is trying to enact one ...
A front page story in this morning’s Washington Post explains why DC’s legalization of gay marriage has been good for the DC economy:
As the first same-sex couples married in Washington on ...
Martin Wolf says no. For instance:
But Germany can be Germany – an economy with fiscal discipline, feeble domestic demand and a huge export surplus – only because others are not.
To be sure, Greece is unlikely to end up as "like Germany." But in this argument -- which I'm ...
I now have in front of me the final issue (vol. 10 no. 3) of Imprints, currently subtitled “egalitarian theory and practice” but originally “a journal of analytical socialism”. Conceived in Dunkin Donuts Piccadilly Circus branch in 1995, and launched in London during Euro 96 (we crowded round a ...
Basic economics: Increasing the fine for delaying flights will result in fewer delayed flights.
Under new federal guidelines that take effect next month, airlines can be fined up to $27,500 per passenger if a plane is stuck on the tarmac for longer than three hours.
Intended Consequence: Increased fines will ...
Colby Itkowitz at The Morning Call digs into Senator Arlen Specter's annual tradition of introducing a flat tax bill, most recently in March 2009 just before he switched from Republican to Democrat. Specter appears to be sticking by the position.
The article correctly points out that while flat taxes ...
The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, increased 0.5 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. ...
The Refinance Index decreased 1.5 percent the previous week and the seasonally adjusted Purchase ...
Anirvan Banerji, director of research at Economic Cycle Research, joins the News Hub to discuss why he believes the U.S. economy will experience more frequent recessions ahead.
Kevin Drum asks a good question about the background blogger briefing at Treasury:
Having read a few posts from the bloggers in question, what I want to know is: Did they really learn anything? Did Geithner and the anonymous SAOs say anything interesting that they wouldn’t have said on the ...
The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency was supposed to regulate payday loans -those extremely high interest rate short term loans- but it now appears that it may not. This could turn out to be a good thing for consumers, since the best way to help payday borrowers might be ...
Their motto is:
Get a subscription service for your socks, t-shirts, andunderwear. Starting at just $7. Delivered to your door every 3 months.
One of their slogans is: "Free Your Mind."
For the pointer I thank Kathleen Fasanella.
A few weeks ago, following the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society conference in Adelaide I drove with my Risk and Sustainable Management Group colleagues David Adamson and Sarah Chambers to Melbourne, going by way of the Murray River. David and Sarah had been to the Coorong in a ...
Banking Matters--Bing's Views
The Bing Blog is one of those well-written something about everything we've all thought about blogs that everybody should read at least every once in a while. So let me suggest a proper post for your introduction, if you haven't ...
The Aid Watch request for reader submissions for Best and Worst of Aid was our experimental attempt to use informal social networks to collect and spread stories about good and bad aid projects. In retrospect, it was only a partial success: we got a lot of submissions that couldn’t be ...
According to the latest poll of small business owners taken by the NFIB, small businesses are not yet moving ...
The NYT reported that China and India both signed an agreement to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. The article cites unnamed analysts who complained that the new commitment by China and India falls short of the terms of the agreement.
The article neglected to mention that on a per ...
Morning Edition introduced an interview with George Soros by saying that the United States is still recovering from a financial meltdown. This is wrong. The reason that we have near double-digit unemployment is that we had an $8 trillion housing bubble that collapsed. The financial crisis was secondary.
This is ...
The NYT reports that the Fed is debating whether much of current unemployment is due to a skills mismatch between workers and the available jobs as opposed to simply a cyclical shortfall in demand. It is worth noting that the assertion of skills mismatch is a predictable behavior of ...
Anyone seriously interested in controlling health care costs would be actively discussing alternatives to patent protection for financing the development of prescription drugs and medical equipment. Everyone who has taken even an intro economics class knows that there will be horrible waste and corruption when goods can sell for hundreds ...
Daniel Little shares his notes:
Rawls on Marx; December 1973, by Daniel Little: John Rawls taught a course on the history of political philosophy throughout much of his career at Harvard University. The course contained his description and analysis of the most important figures in modern political philosophy, including Mill, ...
At MoneyWatch:
Why Do Federal Reserve Board Seats Remain Unfilled?, by Mark Thoma
The administration has not taken full advantage of the opportunity to shape monetary policy during the crisis.
Readers Question: Hello can you please tell me what the disadvantages of using interest rates would be for the economy?
Interest rates can be both beneficial and damaging for an economy. Essentially it depends on how they are used.
For example, if an economy is overheating (with inflation increasing), a rise in ...
Germany and France, working with Luxembourg and Greece, are planning a joint anti-speculation initiative to galvanise action by the European Commission to tighten regulation of derivatives trading, and in particular of CDS in the sovereign debt markets, the FT reports. Angela Merkel called on Tuesday for ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5To
"
We have to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what is in it." That unfortunately ...
“Historically U.S. infrastructure, the basis on which this nation developed, was never some magical response to supply and demand.”
The Erie Canal would not have been built without rights of ...
Shahien’s en fuego. Here he finds a damning HAMP statistic on page 17 of a boring Treasury PDF — HuffPo
Mark Thoma is five years old — Economist’s View
In which Fox Business decides to fisk the NYT on CDS — Fox Biz
The hypocrisy of Gawker Media’s RSS switch ...
On Friday I joined fellow blogger Mark Thoma (and a good many other economists) at a very interesting conference on financial markets held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Here I share some ideas I expressed at the conference about the directions I feel this ...
Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow of Edomonton, ...
Sweden is a powerful example of the importance of public policy. The Nordic nation became rich between 1870 and 1970 when government was very small, but then began to stagnate as welfare state ...
I’m a little scared and more excited to kick off a serious and ambitious exercise in collaboration across a spectacular range of websites, including Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, Reuters, Slate, The Atlantic, Wired, and WNET. It’s called The Climate Desk, ...
In case you ...
Alejandro Nadal says "Progressive movements need to seize the initiative in defining new avenues for macroeconomic policy":
Macroeconomic Policy: The Elephant in the Room, by Alejandro Nadal, Triple Crisis: International conferences on poverty and the environment come and go. ...
Only about a third of the homeowners who have successfully completed the trial period of the Obama administration's mortgage modification program have been offered permanent relief, according to new federal data obtained by the ...
Washington report: Die-hard legislators seem to be having difficulty saying goodbye after Congress adjourned Wednesday; some have recognized a sudden deficit of Washington news and "have remained in the Capital ready ...
Yep, the good news according to the headline of the USA Today article is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that job openings in January were at their highest level since last February of 2009. That would be the month when the economy lost 726,000 jobs.
The numbers ...
Is the discovery of natural resources necessarily a good thing? Examining data from Brazil, this column finds that a 10% windfall in government revenues leads to a 12 percentage point increase in corruption and a 3 percentage point reduction in ...
Jeff Miron, the libertarians libertarian, is not very impressed with TSA:
TSA Makes Amtrak Safer. Really., by Jeffrey Miron: Yesterday I took the train from Boston to New Brunswick for my talk at Rutgers on drug legalization.
So I learned that TSA now requires allbags on trains to have an identification ...
From the News-Press: Sole occupant of 32-story Fort Myers condo wants out (ht several)
Victor Vangelakos is the only buyer to take possession of his unit in the 32-story Tower 1 ...
Young people are worried about losing their jobs and paying their bills, but theyre still holding out hope that conditions will improve.
Some 60% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they were worried about paying their bills and meeting other obligations in this economy as fear of job loss still looms large, ...
It’s not just the NYT: now the BBC is printing “explanatory” articles about credit default swaps which are simply wrong. Check out the factbox:
Government bonds come with an insurance policy, called a credit default swap (CDS).
Hedge funds have been buying up vast quantities of CDSs linked to Greek ...
Which suggests a final thought: Focusing on ...
At one point during the coverage of last Thursday's budget, Allan Gregg suggested that some of the measures - liberalizing the telecoms market, tariff cuts - would bring economic nationalism back to the public agenda (my immediate reaction). And today, Jeffrey Simpson is talking about the
|Peter Boettke|
Emily Schaeffer argues in an op-ed published in the Mercury Newsthat the self-regulation of the free market does a better job than the interventionist policies of government in protecting consumers from unsafe products.
1. Roubini wrong again and again.
2. Cash for Corfu.
3. Axel Weber and Philipp Hildebrand versus Olivier Blanchard.
4. Bill Emmott and Wolfgang Munchau as bumptious prats.
5. Hayek’s lessons for Kevin Rudd.
Should the Fed have done more to combat the unemployment problem? I have made almost all of the arguments against further easing by the Fed made below, i.e. that further easing by the Fed may not have much additional effect on long-term real interest rates, that even if rates could ...
[T]his tightening cycle, when it arrives, will be more complicated than past cycles, as there will be more decision points facing policymakers. With more decision points come more ...
"My Friend Sarah" is about a young girl who was the president of her school's "Progressive" club, and then took an economics class. This video is the winner of the 2009 ...
In his provocative Roadmap for America’s Future, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) figures that his broad tax code overhaul would eventually generate about 19 percent of Gross Domestic Product inrevenues. But the Ryan plan would produce hundreds of billions of dollars-a-year less than that—about 16.8 percent of GDP—a decade from ...
From Scott Beautier at the Economic Way of Thinking who writes that he learned a lot about economics from working at McDonalds. He shares an example
That's why I find stories like this oneabout the Mc10:35 fascinating. At mostMcDonald's around 10:30 ...
Roger Lowenstein has a column up on Bloomberg with the headline “Smart Banks With Dumb Customers Don’t Exist” — which just goes to prove that smart writers with dumb ideas do exist. Ryan Chittum has already done a good job dismantling the piece, but I feel the add ...
Here’s a letter that I sent to the Wall Street Journal:
Bret Stephens interprets Iraq’s recent democratic election as proof that western modernity, with all of its marvels and freedoms, is dawning in that country (“Iraqis Embrace Democracy. Do We?” March 9). And, of course, the Great Liberator who rescued ...
|Peter Boettke|
David Skarbek's essay on the San Pedro Prison has been published in The Independent Review.
Here's more on the comparison of of the performance of the US and Canadian economies during the crisis:
When 5.0% GDP growth is better news than 5.9% GDP growth, by Stephen Gordon:In 2009Q4, US GDP grew by 5.9% at annual rates; the number was 5.0% in Canada. But our news ...
Russ Roberts writes:
Menzie Chinn invokes the CBO "estimates" to argue against those who say the stimulus didn't work. Did the stimulus help turn the economy around and create jobs? I'm skeptical on logical grounds but I confess that I do not have strong empirical evidence on my ...
About 11.4 million out-of-work people now collect unemployment compensation, at a cost of $10 billion a month. Half of them have been receiving payments for more than six ...
For some time now, Federal Reserve officials have been hesitant to put a precise time frame on when they will begin to tighten policy, except to note the action lies well into the future.
But on Monday, one of their chief lieutenants, the man charged with implementing Fed policy, offered a ...
Sales at Caterpillar Inc. are expected to rise 10%-25% this year on inventory restocking and a stronger global rebound than was initially expected, James W. Owens, the companys chairman and chief executive, said on Tuesday.
Caterpillar expects ...We've heard this before but we need to hear it again. Today the message comes from Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. "A number of labor market issues… lead me to think this accommodation will likely be appropriate for some time," he said in prepared remarks ...
Robin Hanson sends along some commentary that simply can’t be ignored.
Merit pay for teachers is an idea that is almost 100 years old and has been subject to much research. In one study conducted in 1918, “48 percent of U.S. school districts sampled used compensation systems that they ...
Maybe we can't devalue our way out of trouble after all.
That was one of the fears sending the value of the pound down again this morning, when the January trade figures showed a surprise widening in the UK trade deficit from £2.6bn to £3.8bn, the highest since August ...
A lot of islands are expensive but here it ispronounced. Western "shopping mall"goods are not bought by many peoplein the core population, so the market consists mainly of low-elasticitydemanders, namely tourists and wealthy expats.A small number of buyers have to cover the fixed costs of transportation to the island plus ...
After Hurricane Ivan, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) paid for the new $40million national stadium, and provided the aid of over 300 labourers to build and repair it. During the opening ceremony, the anthem ...
Cisco has unveiled a new $90,000 networking router with triple the capacity of its previous model. The Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System will help the Internet’s backbone accommodate a new level of high-powered communications, including video. ZDNet
What narcotic cocktail would it take for you to recognize this baby as yourself?
Actress Lindsay Lohan is suing E-Trade after recognizing herself in one of the company’s baby ads. The ad features a baby named Lindsay who ...
This is a guest post by Stella Fayman of TransFS.com.
Accepting credit cards is critical for most businesses. For many, it is the most important financial service.
Unfortunately, most business owners pay much more ...
On Monday, the world marked International Women’s Day. As a husband and father of strong, wonderful women, I am always very much aware of the occasion. But as the Vice President responsible for the gender portfolio at the World Bank, women’s day became a powerful reminder of all ...
In ...
Here's a view from my office window:
Those two smokestacks just above Ohio Stadium* are where this happened. Yikes.
*Objects in picture are closer than they appear.
Kansas Republicans have some ideas on how to help close its $460 million shortfall projected for 2011.
A proposal from Republican leaders in the Kansas Senate would call for $300 million in tax increases to help close the gap in the state's 2011 budget shortfall.
Senate President ...