Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 by BH
Paul Krugman is not impressed with Amity Shlaes' latest op-ed. He's so angry in fact that he even says "Grr." For an economist, that's what counts as emotion. The op-ed is not great, but Krugman is prone to overreaction. But if you care about such debates, it's worth taking a ...
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Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 by BH
After finally coming down from my Halloween induced sugar high, I watched the election coverage yesterday and got all fired up again. Now that things are finally starting to settle down, let's turn our thoughts back to Halloween. Specifically, the costs of Halloween. Oh yeah baby... it's time to talk ...
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Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 by BH
Mark Cuban writes:
In looking at the Democratic platform, there are a few things I agree with, but on the economic side, other than being ok with him raising my effective tax rate to 40pct, there isn’t a lot of his economic policy that I do agree with him on. So ...
Posted in Economics, Politics | No Comments »
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 by BH
One of the themes I've been pushing in a series of posts is that geographic mobility lessens the impact of economic downturns and helps bring the economy back to its "normal" equilibrium. When Los Angeles lost lots of jobs in the defense industry in the 1991 recession, many people were ...
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Thursday, October 30th, 2008 by BH
In theory, the stock market works rationally and investors always exercise a disciplined calculus to part with their hard-won cash.
But in reality, as the previous two days have shown so dramatically, there is a lot of raw emotion and frail psychology in the “demand” half of the crowning equation of “supply and demand.”
The coupling of ...
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Thursday, October 30th, 2008 by BH
Yesterday the Federal Reserve Board cut the Federal Funds rate by 50 basis points to 1 percent. Except they didn't. They had already effectively cut rates well before yesterday. See Businomics for more.
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Thursday, October 30th, 2008 by BH
PBS has a gushing article about economics bloggers. I say it is bunk. First, let me say that many economists do run great blogs and I find that I mostly read economics bloggers. So I do like them. However, much of the best blogging about the financial crisis has been ...
Posted in Economics | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 by BH
In an earlier post I talked about the widespread nature of our current recession and how much different it would be from our previous two, which had very different regional impacts. One part of the story is that there are currently few good places to move. Another part is that ...
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Sunday, October 26th, 2008 by BH
Interviewed in the WSJ:
He [Fred Smith] has come to hold the get-rich-quick Wall Street financiers in more than a little disdain. He views the heroes of the U.S. economy as the companies that actually produce real goods and services. He sees the Wall Street collapse as an inevitable byproduct of ...
Posted in Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »
Saturday, October 25th, 2008 by BH
This used to be pretty close to the consensus view, but no longer:
The kind of self-regulation or light-touch regulation which is being denounced right now by commentators of all stripes is generally speaking pretty effective in most areas of economic life. Restaurants have good incentives not to poison their customers ...
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Saturday, October 25th, 2008 by BH
According to TechCrunch's Layoff Tracker 19,683 people have been laid off from technology companies since mid-September (TC). And 13,809 have been laid off in the past week alone. The job losses are highly concentrated: 5 big firms like Dell and Xerox account for about 90 percent of this total. Only ...
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Friday, October 24th, 2008 by BH
I spent part of Wednesday at a National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) conference on the outlook for housing and the economy and one of the presenters, sorry but I forget who, made a great point about the regional impact of recessions. The point was that in the past a ...
Posted in Economics | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 by BH
As you might guess, this is a lighter post than normal. The blog Lateral Action lists 8 rules you can use to transform yourself into a more innovative person or to create more innovative content. The post is based on lines from the book/movie Fight Club. You don't have to ...
Posted in Economics, Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, October 18th, 2008 by BH
This has been an ongoing debate, and is obviously relevant following the boom-bust in the Nasdaq and now the housing markets. Here's Ben Bernanke and Mark Gertler, an economist at NYU, from a few years back:
In recent decades, asset booms and busts have been important factors in macroeconomic fluctuations in ...
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Thursday, October 16th, 2008 by BH
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta just put out its third quarter issue of EconSouth, a popular magazine covering events in its district. The latest issue asks some questions about remittances:
After years of rapid growth, remittances have leveled off amid an economic slowdown in the United States. How are changing ...
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Thursday, October 16th, 2008 by BH
Americans are afraid of another Great Depression as the Wall Street crisis continues to worsen. Meanwhile, many Indonesians are afraid that the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis will happen again if the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate. Indonesia was badly hit during the 1997 economic crisis. Many people can still remember ...
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Thursday, October 16th, 2008 by BH
Important differences remain between modern pirates and the old-school variety. For example, while 18th-century pirates were at war with all governments, some Somali pirates appear to enjoy state sponsorship, which makes them quasi-privateers. Further, unlike old-school pirates who more or less lived in their own outlaw world, the Somali variety ...
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Thursday, October 16th, 2008 by BH
"These problems were caused by the government," he said. "If you see a building on fire, you don't call the arsonist who caused the fire."
Walter Williams is not impressed with the bailout (inrich). The link also contains a video worth watching, but it does not look like there is any ...
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Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 by BH
Cass R. Sunstein had an interesting piece in The New Republic this weekend looking at the role of information in our current crisis. An excerpt (tnr):
By historical standards, home prices jumped spectacularly from 1997 to 2004. In that period, many people thought, and said, that it is in the nature ...
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Monday, October 13th, 2008 by BH
NYT announcement
The Nobel's Press Release and very thorough Scientific Background (pdf)
His old MIT website with assorted articles (MIT)
The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive
Krugman's blog (NYT)
His old Slate columns ("The Dismal Science")
Paul's best Slate piece
Ed Glaeser's thoughts (NYT)
Dani Rodrik's thoughts
An older profile of Krugman by Nicholas Confessore (WM)
Menzie Chinn offers his thoughts ...
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