Sorry for thin links. Big car accident on drive from airport, greatly increased transit time. ‘Five-minute brain scan’ for kids BBC Health Insurer PacifiCare Faces Up To $9.9 Billion In Fines For Nearly A Million Alleged Health Care Violations Huffington Post (hat tip reader Francois T) Obama mired in surreal US politics Edward Luce, Financial […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and Roosevelt Institute fellow A few years ago, Chris Dialynas and I wrote a piece which introduced the concept of “renegade economics”. It was derived from a Frank D. Graham’s 1943 essay titled, “Fundamentals of International Monetary Policy.” Graham, a Princeton University economist, wrote: “In international affairs we must […]
Read more...Some readers have wondered why this blog from time to time runs posts on the US health care system. Aside from the fact that it’s a major public policy problem in America, it is also a prime example of bad incentives, information asymmetry, and corporate predatory behavior. It thus makes for an important object lesson. […]
Read more...I know some readers may think that Lehman is 2008’s news. That sort of learned attention deficit disorder works to the advantage of those who participated in or enabled the looting of the average person to the benefit of the banksters. And the degree of questionable behavior of Lehman was so pronounced that if regulators […]
Read more...A little shock for the Germans while we’re at it, with resonances for the whole Eurozone. From FT Deutschland: The chief economist of the European Central Bank (ECB), Juergen Stark, considers the German banks to be undercapitalized. Stark made this statement on Wednesday at a meeting with the head of Unions Parliamentary Group in Berlin, […]
Read more...One of the striking features of a really slap-up financial disaster is the immense scale on which those hackneyed old stages of grief (Shock, Denial, Bargaining, Guilt, Anger, Depression, Acceptance and Hope) are worked out. With an eye to illustrating this progression one more time, my last post on Ireland was just a snapshot of […]
Read more...Apologies for thin links, still traveling…. Keeping up appearances Ben Goldacre, Guardian (hat tip reader John M) Humpback dinosaur – theropod of the north Guardian (hat tip reader John M) Labor Day 2010 II Joe Costello Pat Choate: Our “Innovation Crisis” & Patent Backlog The Big Picture (hat tip reader Francois T) Retailers – Reality […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston recently published a paper titled: “Reasonable People Could Disagree: Optimism and Pessimism About […]
Read more...Morning all. A spot of short term cover for Yves, who will be back later today after a mini-epic, with the head of Medusa maybe. In Euroland, Ireland (on which more later if I have time), Portugal (whose banks turned out to need still more funding help from the ECB in August) and Greece (where […]
Read more...I participated in the White House Blogger conference call today, as a stand-in for the traveling Yves. The call was run by Jason Furman, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, who provided a brief recap of President Obama’s speech earlier in the day. The stated purpose of the call was to emphasize the […]
Read more...By Kalpa, who blogs at big picture agriculture. Kalpa’s formal education was in medicine, science, and the humanities. Having seen the destruction that industrial agriculture has done to the biosystem of the Midwestern Plains, where she grew up, she writes on the comprehensive picture of economics in agriculture, ag science, ag policy, food security, energy, […]
Read more...When analysts and commentators go through their laundry list of what ails the hopelessly overpriced US health care system, one of the most commonly cited reasons is the cost of “defensive medicine” meaning both the cost of medical malpractice policies to doctors, plus the costs of extra tests and procedures to provide doctors with cover […]
Read more...Sorry for thin posts, have to do a quick turnaround trip to NYC, then back to Maine. Study slashes estimated rates of ice loss from Greenland, West Antarctica Raw Story (hat tip reader John D) Fears of a Decline in Bee Pollination Confirmed Science Daily (hat tip reader John M) AP Begins Crediting Bloggers as […]
Read more...This post first appeared on April 17, 2008 I am frequently mystified at what goes on in the markets. I am even more mystified when people who ought to know better make pronouncements that appear to be profoundly counter-factual. Even if they are talking their own book, the high odds of being revealed as bald-faced […]
Read more...Martin Wolf, in today’s Financial Times, argues that the eurozone has done wonders for Germany by allowing it to keep the value of its currency down. With Germany’s persistent, large trade surpluses, the value of the deutschemark would eventually have risen, dampening Germany’s trade surpluses and forcing it either to accept a higher level of […]
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