EconoSpeak

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...

On March 18, Reuters noted something I have been following of late: Concerns about the impact of the coronavirus on corporate America's balance sheets has tripled the premium investors are demanding to hold even the highest-rated corporate bonds. The difference between the average yield of investment-grade U.S. bonds over virtually risk-free Treasuries widened to 303 basis points (bps) on Wednesday, according to the ICE/BofA investment grade index. That's up from 101 bps at the start of the...

Just before the end of February, President Trump declared that there were only 15 Covid-19 cases in the US, and that "they will soon go to zero."  Deaths have now passed 3,000 and yesterday Trump declared that because we might have had over 2 million dead if nothing had been done, it would show "we did a good job" if deaths kept to "only" 100,000 to 200,000.  To do this "good job" he has extended his "social distancing" policy to the end of April rather than Easter, April 12 (my birthday)....

Now that I sketched out the transfer pricing for Gilead Sciences with respect to their successful HIV and Hep C products (as much as I can say based on publicly available information), it is time to speculate a bit on how Remdesivir may play out. There is a lot we do not know including whether this treatment receives regulatory approval and how it will be priced if it does. Note for example this story: More than 150 organisations and individuals on Monday urged US biotechnology firm Gilead...

This is the title of a column in today's Washington Post by Jackson Diehl.  His answer is an unequivocal "yes," and I must say on thinking about it I know of no others clearly worse than him, maybe not even any  as bad as him.Diehl focuses on some general incompetence but then focuses on two specific issues that I have posted on here previously.  The most important one, which is getting more serious by the minute, involves Iran.  It is increasingly clear that Pompeo is probably the lead...