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Here’s the ad currently running across the top of my gmail inbox:

Mike Huckabee in 2008 – http://www.mikehuckabee.com – Mike Supports the FairTax. Read What Mike Has To Say.

You may have read the headlines already this morning: Retail sales fell 0.4%. It’s worse than the flat December that economists were predicting, and it’s another nail in the coffin of the U.S. economy–to go with the rise in unemployment reported earlier this month. Surely we’re in a recession now.

Except that, when you go to the Census …

Citigroup’s earnings release this morning is full of all sorts of interesting things beyond just that headline $9.83 billion fourth quarter loss. I imagine the most revealing stuff will be buried in the 10-Q that comes out later, and unearthed by people far more expert than I. Although as earnings releases go, this one is extremely …

Over on Swampland, Ana Marie reports from the Great and Economically Struggling State of Michigan that Romney and McCain have made economic policy a focus of their primary battle there, even though their ideas to help the state are pretty much the same:

As small government conservatives, neither man supports the kinds of targeted

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You’ve heard the talk about a possible fiscal stimulus package to counteract the recession we may already be in.

Maybe we need it. It’s important to note, though, that the Bush administration has had a fiscal stimulus package of sorts in place ever since the middle of 2001. That’s when the federal government started spending more than …

Back when Bank of America paid $2 billion for a stake in Countrywide in August there was talk about how the “strategic investment” would put to an end all the worries that the nation’s biggest mortgage lender might go under. The worries subsided only temporarily; over the past week they turned into a mini-panic that send Countrywide …

Steven E. Landsburg has a piece in Slate proclaiming the FairTax (yes, I’ve decided to give in and go with the no-space version for now) to be “brilliant.” After all the discussion here about difficulties with enforcement and transition, along with questions about whether progressivity over people’s lifetimes is just as good as (or …

I just got an URGENT e-mail from the Office of Champagne U.S.A. informing me that

Belgian Customs authorities seized and destroyed a shipment of over 3,200 bottles of André sparkling wine. The shipment was seized at the port of Anvers, Belgium, on Tuesday. It is the latest in a series of seizures in the last four years, representing

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A reader writes:

I recently read your article [“Reward the Good Guys“] in a September 10, 2007 issue of Time. It certainly makes me curious why you believe the tightening of money for mortgages is a good thing; also, why you think that it might better be in the domain of banks and thrifts? Do you own more than one piece of property? If

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The University of Chicago’s Ragharam Rajan has a smart piece in the FT on one of my favorite topics–the fact that many people in the financial sector get paid big bucks each year for taking bets that will inevitably go sour a few years down the road. They’re producing not alpha, which is true investment outperformance, but beta, which …

The National Association of Realtors issued another upbeat forecast this morning, prompting Barry Ritholtz to assemble, with help from InvesTech, a nice list of similar (and wrong) pronouncements going back to 2005. Which led me to daydream:

WASHINGTON, January 08, 2009 – Over the next few months, existing-home sales are expected to

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Making a mockery of the claim by several commenters on my post about the newspaper business a while back that Google produces no journalism, the company’s senior copyright counsel, William Patry, has written a wonderful exhaustively review of what exactly the Recording Industry Association of America has said through the years about …