Category: Worth a Look

An excellent summation of why the pessimists on employment are wrong–at least in the short term. Deep recessions routinely cause excessive job loss, as businesses over-react to near term perils; dramatic productivity increases, as need for labor exceeds businesses worst fears; and lagging but very strong rebounds in employment as GDP rises and productivity inevitably [...]

Health Care Bill Passes
Think “medical tourism”!

Samuelson rides his hobby horse but makes good points on Greenspan

Samuelson, like most guys with  big idea, wants to fit everything into it these days. But it is his defenses of Greenspan that are most interesting. We used to be always attacking the fellow back in his maestro days, but [...]

Sorkin has the politics of this exactly right

Arguing over the street address of the consumer financial protection  agency makes the GOP look dumb and on the take. (Sort of like real life.) There are really principled and therefor persuasive arguments against a consumer agency, like “consumer protection” in the form of forcing banks to make [...]

Dumb squared
First he implies that traders caused the crisis, when the reverse is closer to the truth (the shorts were the only voice of sanity through the whole farce) then he says the tax would raise tons of money, which could be true only if it does not work, i.e., doesn’t discourage trading.
We think taxing [...]

John Tammy, editor of Real Clear Markets is certainly right that it is absurd to expect the regulators to be smarter than the banks. But that’s only an argument against discretionary regulation, which is what got us in trouble. And banks like lawyers, perform a partly public function and for that reason will always be [...]

Amity Shlaes offers more than rhetoric on the government spending crowding out private employment.
Is it still predatory lending if the borrower has, you know, an army? Michael Hirsh says Goldman is the meanie and that poor little innocent Greek government got suckered. This is a real test of whether liberals will ever hold government responsible [...]

Federal Home Loan Bank sues Wall Street claiming Goldman, others failed to disclose liars’ loans mainly used by liars.  Sure, liars’ loans were bank fraud and everybody involved should go to jail.�
But the way the securitization process worked, it was the folks at the top of the food chain, in this case the Federal Home [...]

Joel Kotkin offers a refreshing dissent from declinism
An unusually intelligent Top 10 Causes of the Crisis List: including an interesting argument that the Fed was too tight in much of ‘06-’07. Also includes a useful list of examples for why the repeal of Glass-Steagal had zero impact on the crisis, and bringing it back won’t [...]

Is an AAA rating good for America? David Reilly at Bloomberg argues that a ratings downgrade is the only way to get Congress’s attention and stop the spending.
Another example of why Brian Wesbury is our favorite economist: Brian gets that–as Andy wrote in a recent client letter– the Fed never pulls back the money until [...]

Bernanke goes all Obama; lays out plan to tighten-up. . . someday. Not saying he is wrong to keep rates low for now; just that making promises to reform someday is a very un-Fed-like, and very politician-like.
If we thought the Administration was serious about coordinating banking reform with Europe, then we’d be scared.  Wait a [...]