Getting real and letting the cat out of the bag | Paul Krugman - “So the plan only helps the financial situation if Treasury pays prices well above market — that is, if it is in effect injecting capital into financial firms, at taxpayers’ expense.
What possible justification can there be for doing this without acquiring [...]
From the category archives:
Links of the day
MarketBeat | Five Reasons: Why the Short-Selling Ban Stinks - “One could suppose that the government’s next step to shore up the flailing equity market would be to order all sales to be on upticks only, or for floor traders to break out in spontaneous applause at the Big Board every 10 minutes, or something.”
Barry [...]
Too Few Regulations? No, Just Ineffective Ones | NYTimes.com - “The biggest financial deregulation in recent times has been an implicit one — namely, that hedge funds and many new exotic financial instruments have grown in importance but have remained largely unregulated. To be sure, these institutions contributed to the severity of the Bear Stearns [...]
National Journal Magazine | Where They Stand - “On many issues, reality pushes the candidates closer together than their rhetoric suggests. McCain may want to keep Bush’s tax cuts intact, but he will not be able to ignore the rising budget deficit. Obama may want to trim the tax cuts, but he dare not overturn [...]
John McCain Has a Tax Plan To Create Jobs | WSJ.com - “John McCain’s tax policies are designed to create jobs, increase wages and allow all Americans — especially those in the hard-pressed middle class — to keep more of what they earn. His plan achieves these goals in three important ways.”
TaxVox: the Tax Policy [...]
For the first time in human history, the North Pole can be circumnavigated | The Independent - “Open water now stretches all the way round the Arctic, making it possible for the first time in human history to circumnavigate the North Pole”
Democracy and accountability: The perverse effects of term limits | vox.eu - “In democracies [...]
Real Time Economics | Fed Paper Backs Use of ‘Core’ Inflation - “Yet some economists argue that it’s harder to dismiss energy and food price gains since they reflect in part global forces that are unlikely to reverse, like the industrialization of China and India. Central banks that target headline inflation like the European Central [...]
Angry Bear | Tax rates, growth, and tax revenues - How a number of series have evolved over the length of each administration beginning with Ike;
Barack Obama, A Free-Market-Loving, Big-Spending, Fiscally Conservative Wealth Redistributionist - NYTimes.com;
In defence of road pricing | Adam Smith Institute Blog - “Road pricing would make people aware of the value [...]
How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar | Slate Magazine - “Paranoid that the Kremlin’s hand is everywhere, we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many [...]
Econbrowser | Oil and the dollar - “The exchange rate is unquestionably one variable that influences the dollar price of oil. In recent data, as much as 20% of oil price movements could be attributed to changes in the exchange rate, or at least to news developments that matter for both exchange rates and oil [...]
