With the GDP numbers out today we now have all the inputs needed to figure out who’s going to win the presidential election. At least, we have all the inputs needed to run the Fair Model, Yale economist Ray Fair’s GDP- and inflation-based formula for predicting whether the incumbent party holds onto the White House or not. Plug in real …
We finally got another quarter of negative GDP–the first since a year ago. The third-quarter number (-0.3%) will be revised as more data come in over the next couple of months, though, and economist Roger Kubarych of Italo-German superbank Unicredit (whose analysis was the first to land in my e-mail inbox) actually thinks it may go …
In a break from our regularly scheduled business and economics programming, I offer some notes I just dug up from a conversation I had with Karl Rove about four years ago (on Sept. 10, 2004, to be precise).
We were mostly talking about William McKinley (a favorite subject of his) and the urban-oriented majority McKinley forged for the …
Three years ago, when the personal saving rate (that is, disposable personal income minus personal outlays, usually expressed as a percentage of disposable personal income) briefly dipped below zero, it was easy to find economists willing to downplay the significance. David Malpass, then of Bear Stearns, was probably the most prominent …
For much of the past year, Ben Bernanke has caught a lot of flack for being too soft on inflation. Journalists mocked the Fed’s apparent reliance on core inflation, which ignored the big food and energy price hikes that were of most interest to consumers. Many economists–and a couple of Federal Reserve Bank presidents–worried that the …
The fun fact of the morning, from Merrill Lynch emerging markets dude Michael Hartnett:
You can buy the entire free float of China and India with today’s market cap of Volkswagen, and still have enough spare change to buy Turkey.
With VW’s stock price down 42% so far today as the Great Porsche Short Squeeze of 2008 unravels, that may not …
Regular readers are well aware that Barbara and I really hate assigning deep meanings to daily stock market movements, and when we are pressed into doing so by our editors we usually respond by writing about volatility.
But today’s 889-point rise in the Dow really takes the cake. There is no plausible explanation for why the market just …
The new S&P/Case-Shiller house-price numbers came out today. They’re for August, so the onset of full-on financial panic in September isn’t reflected, but the news was bad enough: The pace of decline had slowed sharply in April and May and stayed low through July, but now appears to be on the rise again. That may just be a seasonal issue …
I have a brief quote in my new column on the Keynes comeback from the University of Chicago’s Robert Lucas, who in 1980 declared Keynesianism not just dead but laughable (“At research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorizing seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another.”) and later won a Nobel for …
First came the Great TIME.com Blog Crash of 2008. Then I spent Monday as the Nauseous Capitalist, and really didn’t feel up to posting. I still don’t feel great but here, finally, is a perfunctory post linking to my latest column. It begins:
We are all Keynesians now. It’s a phrase that entered public discourse as the headline of a TIME
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Yeah, so all the Time blogs were out for a day or so. And now we’re all moving to WordPress from Movable Type and the blog will have new address (http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/) and all commenters will have to reregister. Not sure what happens with the RSS feed. I’ll find that out on Monday. It’s all a pain, I know. Although I …
As this blog’s focus increasingly shifts to matters Australian, I figured I should check out the homepage of The Australian to see what’s up down there. There I learned that the cricket World Cup final is tomorrow (well, the people at The Australian think it’s “tonight”; they would, wouldn’t they). I’d totally stopped paying attention to …
