Via Kevin Drum, a perfectly depressing Financial Times article about the “crisis in middle-class America,” culminating in this key passage: What, then, is the future of the American Dream? Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, whom the World Bank commissioned to lead a four-year study into the future of global growth, admits to a sense of foreboding. Like a growing… Read more »
Gregory Mankiw makes an analogy: To understand the challenge government economists have faced over the past year and a half, it is useful to imagine the case of a physician trying to treat an ill patient. The patient presents herself in terrible shape; the physician has never treated a condition with symptoms quite like hers before; and the causes of… Read more »
On Twitter yesterday, Melissa Clouthier and I had another one of our epic back-and-forth tweet-debates, complete with multi-part tweets (mostly by me) and rhetorical fireworks. Melissa is on record as calling me her “blog husband,” so is it any wonder we bicker on Twitter like an old married couple? Heh. Anyway, this time, the topic was “unexpectedly” bad economic news… Read more »
If Kyle Whelliston is right about the “Sports Bubble” — basically, the idea that sports (and “sportz“) are massively overvalued right now, and it’s all gonna break, and soon — I wonder if we’ll look back on yesterday’s events as the crest of the bubble’s rise, to be followed by a gradual, and then accelerating, decline as the bubble bursts…. Read more »
[Kudos to Terry Corcoran for coming up with an alternative title for this blog post: Brendan’s Grand Unified Theory of PANIC!!!!!! Hahaha. Brilliant. -ed.] I had an interesting conversation with Melissa Clouthier (and, chiming in at one point, Doug Mataconis) on Twitter today. It started with me criticizing Melissa for, in my view, propagating patently unfair criticisms about President Obama,… Read more »
From the “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but look at this pretty chart” files… Those are stock prices — specifically, the Dow and the S&P 500 — over the last 20 years. Visually, it starts to look a bit like we had 7 or 8 years of genuine growth, followed by Bubble #1 (the tech bubble), then Bubble… Read more »
Ross Douthat has solved America’s deficit problem: Good news, America: Using the online budget simulator created by the good people at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, I’ve successfully reduced our deficit to a relatively stable 60 percent of G.D.P. by the year 2018. All it took was means-testing Social Security and raising the retirement age to 68, keeping… Read more »
[I’ve bumped this post up, because it got quickly drowned on the homepage yesterday by U.K. election coverage. -ed.] Thursday afternoon’s stock-market PANIC!!!!! may have been caused, in large part, by a trader typing “b” (for billion) instead of “m” (for million). Charles Fenwick suggests a Budweiser commercial based on this event: Real Men of Genius Here’s to you, Mr…. Read more »
Party like it’s 2008! The Dow Jones Industrials briefly dropped 998.50 points this afternoon, then recovered within minutes to a loss in the 400 to 500 range, and is now… well… see for yourself where it is now, since anything I type will be obsolete by the time I hit “Publish.” Needless to say, during the crazy moments between, like,… Read more »
The SEC: it’s a WAR!! Against Goldman Sachs!! Fear!! Fire!! Foes!! Awake!! PANIC!!!!! In an absolutely stunning development, Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs, whose influence is so pervasive that it’s been accused of being virtually a branch of the federal government unto itself, has been sued by the federal government — specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission — for alleged… Read more »
