Back in January, the IRS issued a report (pdf) on the income tax returns of the 400 highest-income taxpayers in the U.S. I missed it when it came out, but I’ve been looking through it and it provides a nice, simple demonstration of the fallaciousness of Ari Fleischer’s argument about the tax burden. Fleischer bemoans the fact that the …
Deflation? Not really. Inflation? Not much of that, either
Consumer prices fell 0.4% from March 2008 to March 2009, the first such year-over-year decline since 1955. That’s the headline out of today’s inflation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As with almost all such headlines, though, it’s misleading. The big fall in prices actually came last October through December, as the global …
Noted tax expert Ari Fleischer is back on the case
I was too sick to blog yesterday (big-time congestion + fever + I’m a wimp), and am still too sick to blog much today, but when I saw that the most-viewed piece on wsj.com is another one of Ari Fleischer’s muddle-headed screeds on taxes, I perked up at least a little. Ari Fleischer’s tax ideas always get my adrenaline flowing. His point …
Income inequality in America, golf caddy edition
The latest Sports Illustrated has a nice little reminiscence from Jariah Beard about his years of caddying (1979-1982) for Fuzzy Zoeller at the Masters. Before 1983, only Augusta locals were allowed to caddy at the tournament. Beard tells about the fun that was had in 1979, when Zoeller won the tournament on his first try, then
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You don’t really know Leonard Cohen until you’ve heard him in Frisian
I heard this on my favorite Dutch radio show a while back, and when I discovered today that it’s on YouTube, I could not but share. It’s the Leonard Cohen song “Dance me to the end of love,” sung by Frisian singer-songwriter Elske de Wall and what appears to be her sister Femke. Sung in Frisian, of course (the new title, “Dunsje my de …
New column: Down with the dollar! And up with the SDR! (Up with Esperanto, too, while we’re at it)
My new column is about the thrilling rebirth of the special drawing right, the currency of the International Monetary Fund. Need I say more?
One expert on the subject who was very helpful, but didn’t make it into the column, was C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Bergsten was extolling the …
Whatever is happening with the economy right now, ‘green shoots’ is the wrong metaphor for it
I was walking up Broadway a couple days ago when I saw a BusinessWeek cover in the window of a magazine shop, illustrated with a couple of green shoots poking out of the ground, on “Signs of Life” in the housing market. So much for that housing bottom, I thought to myself.
The green shoots metaphor is now dominating economic coverage. I …
Social Security becomes a fiscal drag. You got a problem with that?
I’ve got a new TIME.com piece on the sudden, recession-caused disappearance of the subsidy the Social Security system has been providing to the rest of the federal government for the past quarter century. This had been projected to happen in 2017, but it turns out we didn’t have to wait. The man you all know as plukasiak tipped me off to …
What’s behind the great TALF bust?
TIME’s Massimo Calabresi has a really interesting little piece about the spectacular lack of interest in the latest round of Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility lending. TALF has $200 billion in potential funding. Last month it loaned $4.7 billion. This month, just $1.7 billion. Writes Massimo:
There are three possible reasons for
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Tim Geithner’s pass-pass bank stress tests
The news, reported by Eric Dash in the NYT, that the stress tests of 19 big banks are almost all done and none of the 19 will be due for an immediate FDIC takeover as a result has been greeted in the financial blogosphere with all manner of hooting and moaning and groaning.
I get the mockery, but I also sort of don’t, given that it was …
GM goes shopping for a bankruptcy court
I have a story up on Time.com which Justin called “actually really interesting.” I thought that was “actually really insightful” on his part, so I decided to do a post. The story begins:
General Motors desperately wants to avoid bankruptcy. But at the same time the automaker is preparing for that possibility. One thing on the to-do list:
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Wells Fargo’s big profits, and what that means for the financial system
Wells Fargo announced this morning that it made a lot of money in the first quarter—”approximately $3 billion.” As I wrote last month when Citi let slip that its January and February looked pretty good, this shouldn’t be all that big a surprise: Federal Reserve liquidity programs and FDIC guarantees have sharply lowered banks’ funding …