If you’d rather just read the outline version, go to Brad’s blog. But I recommend the video. The size of Brad’s coffee mug is truly impressive, plus he’s actually pretty good at explaining stuff verbally. Which is what professors are supposed to be good at it. Many aren’t. The main point that DeLong makes on [...]

I was thinking of doing my column for the magazine this week on something I’ve blogged about a couple of times already–whether the U.S. needs a recession to straighten out some of the imbalances in the economy. Mainstream American economists all seem to think this argument is nonsense, but lately a few perfectly serious economists [...]

I figured I needed to get some photographic record of the Greatest Tuesday Ever in New York City (seriously: a New York presidential primary that matters, Fat Tuesday, and a ticker-tape parade for the Giants, all in one day). I had thought I could get a photo of the big lines outside my polling place, [...]

Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute have a new paper (pdf!) in which they argue that high corporate taxes depress manufacturing wages. NYU law professor Daniel Shaviro allows that they might be right (although they might not) but then asks a crucial question: What to do with the corporate tax if [...]

The Super Bowl apparently drew 97.5 million viewers in the U.S. Sunday night. Which, in a nation of 301 million people, is pretty impressive (it’s 32% of the population). But I’ve taken to listening to Dutch radio news on my iPod lately, so I can report that it didn’t hold a candle to crime reporter [...]

The White House released its proposed FY 2009 budget this morning, complete with pledge that the budget will be back in balance by 2012. Which is, um, three years after George Bush leaves office. In the meantime, the Office of Management and Budget is projecting that, after several years of shrinking, the deficit will grow [...]

Been wondering what the best-performing stock in the world was in January? Well, I just got an e-mail from Russell Investments informing me that it was Impac Mortgage Holdings, an Irvine, Calif., based REIT that specializes in buying Alt-A mortgages. IMH was up a stunning 156% in January. What was the secret to that amazing [...]

When the news came out Friday morning that Microsoft was making a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, I’ve got to admit that I sorta yawned. There’d been talk of this for months and months and months already, and the whole combination just seemed, as Lev Grossman put it, “weirdly uninteresting.” The actual prospect of Microsoft [...]

Lots of gloomy Wall Street economists wrote explanations over the past couple days of why good employment numbers didn’t mean the economy was doing better. They did that because payroll services company ADP estimated Wednesday that the economy added 130,000 jobs in January. Ummm, not quite. Now the Labor Department has come out with its [...]