As part of what I guess is now a continuing series of excerpts from ancient alumni publications, here’s some stuff from Alfred Winslow Jones, the man generally credited with inventing the hedge fund. He didn’t, really: In the 1920s, Benjamin Graham ran a limited investment partnership that bought some stocks and sold others short–the …
Like I said, I’m working on cleaning up my book manuscript this week. While doublechecking something in my notes on Alfred Cowles III, a Chicago Tribune heir and major figure in the rise of the efficient market hypothesis, I came across a paragraph I had written down from the Dec. 1918 issue of The Eavesdropper, the Yale Class of 1913 …
Since I’m on a work slowdown and people are having so much fun commenting on my most recent post on tax cuts and government revenues, I thought I’d recycle a something I wrote in October 2006 when this blog was over at CNNMoney.com and hardly any of you folks were reading it:
I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from Ben Etheridge, a …
I’ve got no column in the current Time, and I won’t be in the next issue either (Person of the Year). Then we’re taking a week off from magazine making before returning with an issue the first week of January. I’ve been using the time to yes, yet again, try to make my book manuscript a part of my past. In the interest of speeding that …
The comment screening software here seems to have gone hyperactive in the past few days, and has been shunting lots of perfectly legit comments (especially but not exclusively those with links) into the junk file. The folks at Time.com don’t know why it’s happening, so I can’t guarantee a fix. But I will try to fish regularly in the …
Calculated Risk has gotten the latest numbers from Fed economist James Kennedy on net equity extraction (the spending money that Americans pulled out of mortgage refinancings and home equity loans) in the third quarter of this year. It was $133 billion, or 5.2% of disposable personal income. Which is way down from 2004-2006, but still a …
On Tuesday the Congressional Budget Office released its latest estimates of how much of their incomes Americans of various income groups fork over in taxes (pdf; xls). Here’s a graphic represention:
There’s something in this chart for everybody–the rich pay much more of their income in taxes than anybody else, but they’ve also been …
I awoke this morning in my Birmingham, Mich., hotel room to the dulcet tones of my old friend Jamie Samuelsen (I used to babysit the guy!) talking about the interminable Les-Miles-Michigan saga on his WDFN radio sports call-in show.
Then he moved on to an article in Tuesday’s Detroit Free Press about how the Red Wings can’t seem to sell …
I’ve got to admit that I really have no opinion whatsoever on the adequacy or inadequacy of the Fed’s quarter-point rate cut (clearly I have no future in monetary policymaking). But it is interesting that the rate cut and its size were pretty much what recent Fed economic forecasts and pronouncements by Fed officials had hinted at for …
I was in the airport this morning about to catch a flight to Detroit when I saw the big headline in the FT: “Putin favours liberal as successor.” Interesting, I thought.
Then I saw the headline in the WSJ, which didn’t say anything about Dmitri Medvedev being a liberal: “Putin Chooses Young Loyalist as Successor.” The second sentence of …
Mark “Economist’s View” Thoma was appalled by my statement in this post that, “Some tax cuts do raise revenues, of course.” So much so that he took back a bunch of nice things he’d just said about my column on Arthur Laffer.
Chastened at having so disappointed the alarmingly prolific man from Eugene, I briefly contemplated changing my …
My column this week is about the persistence of the Republican canard that tax cuts raise revenues. Some tax cuts do raise revenues, of course, and many others deliver economic benefits that offset some of their cost. But it has apparently become required of Republican politicians at the national level that they speak as if tax cuts …
