The Economy: Front and Center

The news is full of economics these days.  The first thing on the agenda is and should be jobs.  The Hill has the headline which continues to pit providing a fiscal boost to the labor markets with the federal deficit. Again, I rely on the idea of a cyclical deficit and automatic stabilizers.  When the [...]

Working on Work

The LA Times has an article up today about a multibillion-dollar jobs bill in the works in Congress. Senators Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) are working on the bill in the Senate.  It’s not clear from this article who has the ball in the House, but it appears that there’s interest [...]

They used to call it Hooverville

Here’s one you’re not hearing much about in the U.S press.  Along with hunger, homeless is getting worse.  This is from the Guardian and their source; a UN investigator who accuses the US of shameful neglect of the homeless.
A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has [...]

Who Holds Wall Street Accountable?

If your answer included any of number regulators or congress with its oversight duties or the traditional media with its watchdog of the public duties sorta answer, that would be a wrong answer. There were so many articles today about past and present Wall Street tomfoolery that I almost forgot [...]

Some times being Right doesn’t always make you Feel Good

You may remember back in January that I was not happy and very outspoken about the size of the Obama Stimulus plan.  I was not impressed by the content or with the mix between tax cuts and direct government spending. You may recall that the Blue Dogs interminable resistance to do anything that might wake [...]

It’s still about the Jobs!

I keep repeating this like a mantra, but an economy that relies on households buying 70% of its production, and households that rely on wages for 67% of their income, is not going to get healthy until it creates more jobs.  That’s why Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, and this Cajun Country Economist are still stuck [...]

When Deficits Matter …

There’s a lot of misunderstanding in popular culture (most started during the Reagan years) about deficit spending and the public debt.  Deficits tend to increase naturally during bad economic times due to what we economists call automatic stabilizers.  These are spending programs (most of which were built into the economy during the New Deal) that [...]

We need a New Brain Trust

While the U.S. economy sputters, France and Germany appear to have exited their recessions and returned to modest growth during the spring.  There’s been a distinctly different approach to macroeconomic policy taken by Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy and their respective finance ministers that deserve elucidation.
The French and German economies both grew by [...]

What’s a little Hindsight Worth?

Kenneth Rogoff is a Havard professor of Economics and Public Policy.   He’s decided that a year is enough to buy some hindsight about the financial crisis. He’s also got a particularly dismal view of the economy over the next five years.  Yves at Naked Capitalism framed the Rogoff article with a  Shakespeare line and offered [...]

Why I’m not smoking the Green Shoots Yet

Paul Krugman and other economic commentators, including the Wall Street Cheerleading Squad at CNBC, have been out and about saying we’re stepping away from the Depression Abyss. It’s true, and I’ve said it here, that we’re seeing a slowing down of that incredible momentum towards the edge.  Things do look less bleak than they [...]