Brad DeLong, responding to my post on The uncertainty of stimulus, offers A Guide for the Perplexed Justin Fox on Fiscal Policy. His basic point is that World War II proved beyond a reasonable doubt that fiscal stimulus can work:
Demand expansion–deliberate attempts by governments to put the unemployed back to work by deficit spending
…
Seems GE is going to start paying its employees to quit smoking. There’s been a fair amount of (inconclusive) research about whether paying people to quit smoking—or lose weight, or eat better—works in the long-run. Apparently, this study, conducted with GE employees and published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, convinced …
Barbara and I both participated, not entirely unwillingly, in TIME’s group effort to pick 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis. It was initially conceived as a Web project (at first we were going to try for a list of 75, but that just seemed way too tiring, both for us and for readers), and while it has ended up in the magazine as …
Financial crises like the current one actually strengthen America’s global position, Walter Russell Mead argued in the pages of The New Republic a few weeks ago, because they don’t cause us to entirely lose faith in capitalism.
Countries that can encourage–or at least allow and sustain–the change, dislocation, upheaval, and pain that
…
Dan Kadlec has had a piece up on TIME.com for a few days that reviews How to Know When the Economy is Turning Up. My favorite among the leading indicators he cites is The Pasta Indicator:
Pasta is a cheap meal, and sales are shooting through the roof — rising 22% in 2008 after years of tepid growth, according to Nielsen Co. Much of the
…
I haven’t bloviated about soccer here in an awfully long time. So here goes: Curious Capitalist Jr. and I will be glued to ESPN2 (or maybe our local Univision station) tonight starting at 7 p.m. Eastern to watch the latest installment in what is becoming one of the world’s great soccer rivalries: U.S. vs. Mexico, in a qualifier for the …
Felix Salmon has a long and rousing defense of Suze Orman against an attack piece by documentary filmmaker James Scurlock:
There are millions of Americans out there who fail to pay their credit card in full each month despite the fact that they have money in the bank to do so. There are tens of millions who have stock-market investments
…
In his big speech Tuesday, and while answering questions from members of the Senate Banking Committee afterwards, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner used extreme care when he talked about goosing the amount of lending done by banks. Here’s the phrasing from his speech, which he repeated almost verbatim later in the day:
The capital will
…
I’ve got a piece up on TIME.com about our new Treasury Secretary’s first real day in the spotlight (I give him better marks than the stock market did). Meanwhile, Stephen Gandel discusses the actual plan. And Adam Smith has an entertaining article about British bankers saying they’re sorry again and again and again. Enjoy!
Barron’s has a long and sobering interview with Ray Dalio, chief investment officer of the big hedge fund firm Bridgewater Associates (which actually made its investors money last year). He believes that comparing our current economic predicament to the recessions of the post-World War II era fails to take into account the deleveraging …
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has just finished his first big speech. The contents had already been so widely reported that there weren’t any big surprises. The main message that Geithner seemed to be trying to get across was that, while he had no big plan to solve the financial crisis in one fell swoop, he intended to proceed with …
I’ve been having trouble reconciling my support for (or at least acceptance of) the Democratic fiscal stimulus plan with the reality that the evidence on stimulus is extremely murky. Then it hit me: Maybe this is Pascal’s wager all over again. From the Pensees:
If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither
…
