EconoSpeak

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,...

I am referring to a comment Sean Hannity made on his show earlier this evening in his monologue. The reports tht  President Trump was under  invesdtigation by FBI Counterintelligence as being a possible "Russian asset" supposedly taking orders from Vladimir Putin has pusheed uber Trump defender Hannity to ever more surreal forms of defense, in this case one especially bizarre given the cloase association in Trump's early career between him and Roy Cohn, the lead attorney for the late...

The big news in New York City is that the Chrysler Building is for sale: New York City's iconic Chrysler Building has appeared in dozens of movies and remained an Art Deco jewel of the Manhattan skyline for decades. Now, the 89-year-old skyscraper can be yours. Located on 42nd Street just east of Grand Central Terminal, sale price estimates for the famed Chrysler Building vary, but its majority owners, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, hope to recoup the $800 million it paid for their stake...

In the world of urban politics, there is probably no more potent populist rallying cry than the demand to halt gentrification.  Activists have fought it on multiple fronts: zoning, development subsidies, permitting, rent control—every lever housing policies afford.  But what if they’re mistaking cause for effect, hacking away at the visible manifestations of the problem while leaving the problem itself intact?Pivot to an important article in today’s New York Times, reporting on recent...

An issue so far not openly addressed in this "Partial Shutdown" situation is that those who have been deemed to be "essential," are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay.  I really do not know the  law that says that thesee people must work without being paid within a reasnable time period of their work, but  my basic view of  this is that people being forced to woork without being paid in a clearly established time period...

As an example of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter cited the 1964 Senate testimony of a witness who had driven all the way from Bagdad, Arizona to denounce the regulation of interstate shipment of firearms as "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us part of one world socialistic government." According to the witness, Dr. William Gorder, the proposed Dodd bill would "create chaos which can only aid our enemies." Dr. Gorder further expounded on the theme...