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Category Archives: Economics

Mea culpa

Sunday, June 9, 2013

A day or two ago I penned a short post about a study that showed that inequality in the United States was a result of deliberate governmental policy. The point I tried to make, in a more or less humous vein, is that it doesn’t take a study to make that finding; the facts are [...]

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Fresh from the Department of Redundancy Department

Thursday, June 6, 2013

David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times reporter on economic issues, analyzes a recent study of wealth among five nations among those with the richest economies and concludes: “In short, what the paper shows is this: Inequality is a product of government policy.” (via Widening Economic Inequality in United States Is [...]

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Fuzzy logic

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Much like fuzzy math, except this time it’s really fuzzy, not fake fuzzy like Bush’s. In this morning’s Times, writing on behalf of the usually superb ProPublica, Jesse Eisenger defends the hedge fund guys that have been attacking the Fed and takes to task the economic bloggers that have been having a field day making [...]

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Friday Night Bonus Video

Friday, April 26, 2013

Stephen Colbert destroys Reinhart and Rogoff, in two parts: Part Two: What a strange world we live in. The comedians are the only ones who tell us the truth. If you’ve been following this controversy you may know that the New York Times has given the duo two columns today in which to defend themselves [...]

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An economic theory, revisited

Friday, April 26, 2013

Paul Krugman grapples with the baffling fact that austerity continues its grip on policy when it has been proven ineffective time and again: Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, [...]

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Nothing to see here

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Matt Stoller writes: Earlier this week, the House Ag Committee marked up some bills deregulating derivatives. I don’t think they were expecting anyone to really notice, but there was a bunch of press on what they did. The next step in the legislative process is for the House Financial Services Committee to look at the [...]

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Graphing inequality

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

No time to actually post anything, but I thought I’d pass this along, which I saw here.

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Thursday, February 28, 2013

One would like to think that local media, including local independent newspapers, would be immune from the disease of beltway centrism, but at least in the case of the New London Day, that’s clearly not the case. Today’s Day channels the Washington Post. A basic requirement for beltway punditry is that one must operate in [...]

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Always look on the bright side of life

Monday, February 18, 2013

Here’s what you call mixed good news, about which I intend to follow the Python’s advice: WalMart executives are freaking out over lousy sales, according to this article in Business Insider. After a disastrous January, one WalMart exec wrote in an email that February sales so far are a “total disaster,” according to a Bloomberg [...]

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A prognostication

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

We learn from this morning’s Day that Amazon will be building a “customer fulfillment center” here in the Nutmeg State, and will have to begin collecting sales taxes on in state purchases in November. Amazon, of course, has been in the forefront of the lobbying effort to keep states from collecting sales taxes on internet [...]

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