EconoSpeak

We took a trip this weekend, driving 180 miles each way on I-5 through Oregon and Washington State.  We kept our eyes peeled for bumper stickers relating to the upcoming election but counted only three for Trump and an amazing zero for Biden.I’ve never seen anything like this before in the US.  (In Europe bumper stickers don’t seem to exist at all.)  Just four years ago you could see Clinton and Trump plastered on cars everywhere.Is this your experience too?And what does it mean?  This...

 It has long been a truism of economics that high interest rates were favored by wealthy capitalist lenders against poor borrowers, with such a view lying behind the populist demands of the late 19th century.  We are used to applauding Keynes's forecast of the "euthanasia of the rentiers." But now that such a situation is upon us of increasingly likely very low interest rates for a long time ahead, this euthanasia does not seem so much like something poorer people should be all that happy...

 A sign that this entity should be abolished, and I mean really gone, done in, not with its parts redistributed to other entities, is that it is an an entity defined by its director, not itself.  In preparing to write this post I checked on it, and I thought it was the ONI, the Office of National Intelligence. But, no, it is the ODNI, spelled out as above, really. And it should go.Why was it ever created in the first place, this unnecessary entity?  It was created in 2005 as a reaction to...

Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon join a long list of people Donald Trump doesn't know about.Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas"I don't know those gentleman. Now, it's possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. I don't know them, I don't know about them, I don't know what they do."Jeffrey Epstein"I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him, I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you."Michael Flynn"It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before...

 I have just read that jazz pianist Keith Jarrett will not be performing live any more, indeed has not done so for some time.  He had two strokes back in 2018, the last year he released an album, and apparently he is simply not able to use one hand.  He does not wish to perform with only one hand.I saw him once live, in 1967 in the Memorial Union theater at UW-Madison, when he was playing in the Charles Lloyd Quartet.  He got attention then for reaching over and directly playing strings on...

 The election is two weeks from today.  When I took an into psych course over half a century ago, I was taught in it that two weeks is the period of short term memory, the period in which we remember events with special salience.  I do not know if this is still the official view of the profession, but it has since then made sense to me: I seem to be able, even now, to remember what happened day by day for the previous two weeks.  Things before then are "in the past," although certainly some...

 Rudy Giuliani is Roger Stone without the boyish insouciance.

 In yesreday's Washington Post David Ignatius reports in a column about serious efforts by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) to get the infamous emails of Hillary Clinton publicized, something that President Trump also wants and SecState Pompeo has been promising while complaining about problems getting them out.  My guess is there is nothing in them not already known, but MbS has really been pushing on this.  Aside from trying to help his pal, Trump, what is up with this?Ignatius...

 I know this is a widespread basically trivial matter, but since I had posted earlier about all of the BLM signs on my block (including at our house) accompanied more recently by signs related to the various political races (we have a Senate race, as well as House, and city council here) on the block, where we had some apparently hostile drivebys some while ago.So last night somebody came and stole all the signs off our block that were not clearly for a GOP candidate in some race, with all...

 I have noted in various places that I could not make a forecast this year on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel because of all the turbulence on so many fronts going on.  So it occurred to me that the committee might avoid political controversy by going technical, although I thought it more likely they would give it for something in econometrics. But this year's award was clearlyi in the works after Jean Tirole and Alvin Roth got theirs.  The real...