EconoSpeak

Current media is denouncing  VA Gov Ralph Northam with many demanding he resign now over an unfortunate incident in his youth.I note that that the final crucial person who gave us Obamacre was  the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.  He was in his youth a member of the Klu Klux Klan, indeed held some office in it. In the end when the ultimate votes in the Senate came, which had Rebublicans denouncing him over his 1940s support of the KKK, and  some of them openly hoping he would die as he...

Robert H. Nelson of the University of Maryland Public Policy Department died at age 74 on Dec. 15 while attending a conference in Helsinki, Finland.  He was the leading economist writing about the relationship between religion and economics, notably in three books: Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991), Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (2001), and The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Enviornmental Religion  (2010).  I spent...

Wait long enough, and great ideas come back around, although not necessarily wearing the same garb.  Elizabeth Warren has just come out for a 2% wealth tax (above $50 million).*  But this is simply an annualized version of my lump sum stochastic jubilee.  What’s the advantage of redistributing the whole thing every 50 years (on average) vs a steady trickle?  A periodic reset would interrupt long run processes of wealth inequality more fully than a tax, so long as the rate of return on...

In Washington Post, 1/25/19 metro section there is a story recounting that the Library of Congress of the US has acquired the only diary of an American slave written in Arabic by Omar bin Said  in 1831, originally from Senagal.  The completion of this world historical accesson will now be able to proceed now that the ridiculous US federal governmint shhutdown so stupidly ordered by Preisident Trump has come to an end for nowOmar bin Said was a deeply serious Islamic scholar up until his...

From Siligato v. State: The story starts in early 1985 when one Arthur Hall, a special agent of the F.B.I., was arrested following a four-month joint investigation by the New Jersey State Police and the F.B.I. into Hall's suspected involvement in an extensive motor-vehicle theft operation in the Atlantic City area. At that time Siligato was asserted to be a confidential informer of both the F.B.I. and the State Police.  According to Sheeran's affidavit in support of the warrant, Hall,...

As many now know, a large group of prominent economists, led by a large group of Nobel Prize winners, has published a petition in the Wall Street Journal.  This petition declares the idea of putting a tax on carbon and then returning the receipts from it to the population on an even per capita basis to be the best and most efficient plan for dealing with global warming.  This group continues to encourage more professional economists to sign this petition.  I had previously received an...

Having watched ALL the videos, my humble opinion is "a plague on all your houses." Not so much the hapless participants at the Lincoln Memorial as the viral legions of "outraged" spectators who turned a circus of misperception into a carnival of righteousness and condemnation.HAVEN'T YOU ALL GOT ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?Trust me when I say that OUTRAGE has a right-wing bias. There are several reasons for this. One is that the right is fueled by outrage. A second reason is that the Mostly...

This is a situation that may be on the verge of disappearing and more or less normalizing, but over the last couple of months US bond markets have exhibited a weird phenomenon of non-monotonicity.  It has been even weirder than what we saw during the period of negative nomial interest rates, when what we saw was interest rates on US treasury securities fell from the shortest time horizon to a low usually around the two-year  time horizon, with the pattern then revetting to its usal upward...

BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate. -- Office of the Special Counsel. If this is the first story the special counsel has felt compelled to dispute, does that mean he had no objection to all the others that have come out before now? -- Peter Baker, New York Times. These things cannot both be true:The Mueller...

Who? What? Where?Long a headliner in the news, Iran has disappeared from the headlnes, and even the inside pages.  It has largely disappeared from the news, after being the big headline for a long time.  This is probably good for Iran, despite its many problems.I have made a big effort to find out its current economic status. The little data out there seems to suggest that not much is happening. GDP had been falling in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear  agreement,...