Attack of the Clones To the best of my knowledge, no where among the nearly 2,300 pages that is the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the hundreds of proposed new regulations is there anything restricting human cloning. And that, it turns out, might be a bad thing. Recently, a nearly decade [...]
The Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 different markets rose briskly in June, according to Standard & Poor’s. This may give a nice boost to the stock market but it’s a pretty meaningless statistic because the data is two months old. That puts it right at the tail end of the buying flurry that [...]
One of the big reasons people argue against raising taxes for the richest Americans is that higher taxes make people less inclined to work. The result is that raising taxes at some point doesn’t raise any more tax income for the government. This is in effect the famous Laffer Curve. I’m not sure I believe [...]
Are housing prices near a bottom? It’s not just policymakers, realtors and bankers who yearn for the turn. Anyone who owns a house, a condo or coop is surely wishing for some modest improvement. Not the least of these hopefuls is homeowner-in-chief Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who just this past Friday lamented the heavy [...]
Bernanke made a speech this morning to other central bankers, economists and journalists at an annual forum in Jackson Hole. There were a number of key phrases Fed watchers were expecting to hear and, hopefully, not hear. And here’s the tally. Bernanke used some variation of the work “slow” seven times. So, as expected, Bernanke [...]
Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke’s much anticipated speech to the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole conference was fairly vague about Fed’s future course—no surprise there— but was also quite frank about the fact that the economy appears more sluggish than it looked to be just a few months ago. This reality check comes on the [...]
The big news of the market today is Ben Bernanke. He is speaking this morning at 10 AM at a conference for central bankers in Jackson Hole. The general outlines of what Bernanke will say probably won’t be a surprise. He will probably overview the Fed’s efforts to boost the economy so far. He will [...]
Fed chairman Ben Bernanke needs your help. Bernanke is looking for a word that means longer than extended to tell people how long he plans to keep interest rates low. And what he is looking for is a word that means a really, really long time–really, really. Superextended. Overextended. Superduper-extended. So this is what the [...]
Notwithstanding Thursday’s slight improvement in weekly jobless claims, it’s been a pretty rough summer on the economic front. On Wednesday we learned that durable goods orders rose a tepid 0.3% for the month of July, less than economists had expected. On Tuesday, existing home sales tumbled 27%, much more than economists had expected, and the [...]
