EconoSpeak

Indeed, are we surprised? But POTUS has reached a new level of hypocrisy on all this.So a while ago when oil prices began falling sharply, Trump bragged about how much this was going to help consumers, and he should get credit for it, of course.More recently, since WTI crude and even Brent fell below $30 per barrel (with WTI just over 20 right now, and Brent just over 30), he became worried about his pals in the oil patches of Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, with Putin and MbS openly...

"The helpless fixation on notions of security and property deriving from past decades keeps the average citizen from perceiving the quite remarkable stabilities of an entirely new kind that underlie the present situation." -- Walter Benjamin Vor Dem Maskenball (with updates) -- Max Beckmann, 1922 The contemporary relevance of the section titled "Imperial Panorama: A Tour of German Inflation" from Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street never ceases to astonish me. Yesterday I finally understood...

I had to do a double-take when I saw this news item.  First came the headline, “Pence won't let public health officials appear on CNN unless Trump's disinfo briefings run in full”.  I thought, this is horrible: the administration is holding Fauci and Birx hostage to force CNN to cover not only them but also Trump in his daily blatherings.  But no, it was exactly the other way around.  Pence was keeping them from being interviewed on CNN unless the network also covered their regular...

A discussion from October 29, 2019: A crucial federal program tracking dangerous diseases is shutting down. Predict, a pandemic preparedness program, thrived under Bush and Obama. Now it’s canceled … Ever since the 2005 H5N1 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has run a project to track and research these diseases, called Predict. At a cost of $207 million during its existence, the program has collected more than 100,000 samples and found nearly 1,000 novel...

First, all who produce things we need or want are “essential workers”.  Health care practitioners are essential, but so are the people who stock pharmacies and grocery and hardware stores or staff customer service phone lines.  Truck drivers are essential.  Farmworkers who pick the crops we plan on eating are too.  Nothing demonstrates whose work matters in this world better than a pandemic that threatens to pull them off the job.Second, because they are essential, whatever these workers...

Yes, in the midst of deaths and deep recession there may be someting good that may come from this pandemic.  Saudi Arabia's leaders have announced a cease fire in Yemen after five years of war, one also accepted by its ally, the recognized government there.  Unfortunately so far the Houthi enemies of the Saudis and the recognized government have not so far accepted this proposed cease fire, and in fact it is not the first time the Saudis have called for one, with the previous efforts having...

Robert Waldmann posted his Remdesivir III: I do not understand the need for “evidence-based medicine” or rather I do not understand how the phrase is used by doctors. There is no evidence that Covid 19 patients (without heart disease) do better without Chloroquine. I learn that “evidence based medicine” does not imply choosing the therapy that a fair balance of evidence suggests is best for the patient. Pharmaceuticals are presumed guilty until proven safe and effective. The evidence is...

1977 physics Nobel Prize winner Philip Warren Anderson has died at a Princeton nursing home at age 96, cause not reported.  He received his prize for work in "condensed matter physics," a label he coined.  His work, done at Bell Labs (later he was at Princeton U.), had relevance for the functioning of circuits in computers and other important uses.  He also did important work on antiferromagnetism, the Higgs particle, spin glassses, and several other topics, with several effects named for...

Yes, depression, and not the psychological type, although the economic type leads to the psychological type, whether ot not it is the other  way around (see Keynes' "animal spirits).I often make fun of Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post, but in Washington Post today he raised the possibility that we are going into a depression, not just a bad recession.  On TV this evening I heard Austen Goolsby throw it out as well.  I suspect we are going to hear it a lot more.The problem is not...

The Covid-19 pandemic won’t last forever, and at some point we will have to return to figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis.  (What a depressing opening line.  No, I have no desire to live in a world of permanent crisis.)  Is the answer a Green New Deal?  Challenge has just published my analysis of this; you can find the link here.Abstract: The Green New Deal, an attractive agenda of increased investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy sources, is not remotely...