The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a jaw-droppingly misleading graph that portrays China as spending more on its military than the US. In reality, the Pentagon’s budget is roughly three times larger....When the St. Louis Fed published the deceptive graph on Twitter, it went viral, garnering hundreds of negative responses.Michael P. McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, quipped, “If they’re willing to put this out, just imagine the internal...

On gender and alcohol Breaking news! Using advanced multiple nonlinear regression models similar to those in recent news stories on alcohol and dairy and more than 3.6M observations from 1997 through 2012, I have found that drinking more causes people to turn into men! Across people drinking 0-7 drinks per day, each drink per day causes the drinker’s probability of being a man to increase by 10.02 percentage points (z=302.2, p<0.0001). Need I say,...

Recently, The American Prospect‘s David Dayen’s introduced us to a new student loan system. A new program implemented for income driven based repayments (IDR). It requires lesser payback amounts and shorter a time period than the of 25 years to pay back. Unfortunately, a person would still be in their mid-forties if everything works out as planned. No restraints on tuition yet having the freedom to grow. There is a question of whether earlier relief...

 In collaboration with Godfree Roberts and his excellent Here Comes China weekly newsletter.  This selection is but a fraction of what is a rich, complete and interesting newsletter.Mostly finance and economics.Global SouthHere comes Chinaamarynth

Blog How I learned to stop worrying and love responsible borrowing 7 things you should know about government finances By Jeevun Sandher 23 January 2023 1. Responsible governments, like responsible businesses, borrow to keep things on track during...

In the 1920s and early 30s, John Maynard Keynes was embroiled in a controversy with the ‘austerians’ of his time, who believed that balancing the government budget, even in a time of economic volatility and decline and financial fragility, was necessary to restore ‘investor confidence’ and therefore provide stability. Keynes was horrified by the idea. Zachary Carter’s brilliant biography notes that Keynes felt a package of government spending cuts and tax increases would be ‘both futile...

Look how these Art degree morons describe the result of this rocket test by Musk… “humiliating explanation!”…SpaceX Falcon Heavy landing explosion forces Elon Musk into humiliating explanationhttps://t.co/PSYWlohkHI pic.twitter.com/nQsiq2mQZe— Daily Express (@Daily_Express) June 27, 2019 Here’s musk: "The South African entrepreneur posted: “High entry force & heat breached engine bay & centre engine TVC failed.”  No biggie… make some adjustments…That was a few years ago now...

Second greatest scene in motion picture history… up at 4am to train and fails:[embedded content]We need to default…Yet here he is a month later:[embedded content]We need to default you pussies…

Its been around 9 months since the central banks of the world (bar Japan) started to push up interest rates. And still there are no firms signs that a recession is impending. There are some signs of a growth slowdown but that is not uniform across the globe. The US seems to be continuing to grow. While that suggests that monetary policy is less effective than the mainstream economists claim – which is no surprise to non-mainstream economists who have long understood that fiscal policy is the...