Holey moley. I missed this when economist Willem Buiter posted it on his FT.com blog a few days ago. He says the front-runners for the Fed chairmanship when it comes open next year are incumbent Ben Bernanke, SF Fed President Janet Yellen and Larry Summers, then writes: Both Bernanke and Yellen are qualified for the [...]
My new column, on Washington’s campaign to regulate executive and Wall Street pay, is online. It’s got a lot of Lucian Bebchuk in it, and this morning Bebchuk is at it again, with a WSJ.com op-ed (co-authored with his Harvard Law School colleague Alma Cohen) making the case that it appears banks have actually gotten [...]
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released its “advance” estimate for second-quarter gross domestic product this morning. GDP shrank at just a 1% annual rate in the quarter (adjusted for inflation). The consensus forecast among the sad folk who while away their days predicting quarterly GDP numbers had been for a 1.5% decline, so [...]
In working on my column last week about the good times at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, I had interesting conversations with a couple of people who know a lot more than I do, MIT economist Simon Johnson and Brookings Institution/Kauffman Foundation economist/lawyer/all-around-policy-wonk Robert Litan. Sadly, none of their quotes made it into my column. [...]
It has gotten to be pretty much consensus opinion that: (1) the Great Recession is about to end, or already has but (2) the recovery will be weak and fitful. That’s what Dan Gross’s cover story in this week’s Newsweek says, at least. I made the same claim in my column a few weeks ago, [...]
The Daily Show‘s John Oliver took a look at Tim Geithner’s hard-to-sell Larchmont, N.Y., house last night. The segment wasn’t all that funny, but the part where Oliver gets Robert Shiller to comment on whether Geithner’s turquoise (aqua? teal?) bathroom tiles are driving away buyers is surreal enough to be worth a look. I kind [...]
Between his admission to FBI agents in December that he’d been running a Ponzi scheme and his sentencing for his crimes last month, Bernie Madoff didn’t say much—at least not where any of us could hear him. Now that he’s in prison for several lifetimes, though, he’s turned chatty. Attorneys Joe Cotchett and Nancy Fineman—who [...]
Alex Tabarrok offers a handy summing-up of what experimental economics has taught us about bubbles: In the lab we can create artificial assets with known dividend streams and thus known fundamental values. Since Vernon Smith’s classic experiments (JSTOR), we know that even in these cases efficient markets fail and bubbles are common. … Circuit breakers [...]
The first data point comes from a press release from the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center (it’s not online): According to the just released July 28 Levy Forecast, while many give the private economy credit for resiliency, “Few understand that the government deficit now accounts for all of the economy’s profits.” The second is in Mark [...]
Almost three years ago, Netflix announced it would award $1 million to anyone who could improve its movie-recommendation algorithm by at least 10%. (That’s the computer programming that tells you that if you like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, chances are you’ll also like Kurosawa films—odd as that may sound.) Well, for the price [...]
