EconoSpeak

The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt.  As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt.  We've been through this many times before, and I have nothing to add.I do want to focus on one sentence, however, to illustrate how intellectual blinders can lead to absurd conclusions.To quote the...

Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Hea viruslth Organization (WHO).  It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the coronavirus and the WHO for supposedly supporting China in their supposedly nefarious conduct, alloeing hin to wallow in  fit of xenophobia as well as accusations against Joe Biden for being "soft on China."  Certainly China was slow to act against the virus, although...

I have previously posted on the highly swingy politicsal nature of southwestern Wisconsin, symbolized by the town there at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, French-founded Prairie du Chien (named for an Indian cheif, it turns out, who was "Dog of the Prairie" in English).  It seems that how SW Wixsonsin goes, so goes the whole state, at least in 2012, 2016, and 2018.Now we can add an election in 2020, that for a seat on the state Supreme Court, where liberal Dem Jill Karofsky from Madison...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly.There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income guarantees. These must be viewed not as...

The St. Louis FED has an economics blog: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption in economic activity across the globe. Financial markets, in particular, have experienced surges in volatility that had not been seen since the 2007-09 financial crisis … The figure below plots the median value for our measure of credit spreads (the difference between a corporate bond’s yield and a benchmark interest rate on U.S. government securities) at the daily frequency, since the...

The two best chess players in the world faced off this month, undeterred by lockdowns, travel bans or any other restrictions.  They never had to see each other either.It helped that they were both computer programs.  The former champ, Stockfish, is the strongest of the traditional type of program, designed by humans and invested with all the fine points of judgment the best human players can translate into code.  Because of its tremendous calculating abilities, it is rated far higher than...

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...