I was asked recently by a friend about my thoughts on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. While people a heck of a lot smarter and more articulate than me have weighed in, most of it has been focused on finger-pointing (who’s to blame) and judgment (do they actually stand for anything, “its the Tea Party [...]
Another month, another paper. This month’s paper from Science is not the usual traditional science fare I’ve tended to blog about. I heard about this on the Science magazine podcast (yes, I subscribe to it). In it, two economists basically find a way to run a randomized clinical trial to see what microfinance does! For [...]
On the advice of one of the members of the little investment club I am a part of, I picked up David Moss’s book A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics. I wasn’t expecting much, having taken a few introductory economics courses in college and being a casual economics aficionado, but I gave it a shot. And, [...]
Ed Glaeser was an economics professor of mine in college. He proudly called his class “boot camp” for economists and noted that while his class reviews always said that his class was “too difficult and too fast”, he never planned to change it. When I found out that he wrote a piece for the New [...]
From the Telegraph (HT: Serena): The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US Treasury bonds if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation. Two Chinese officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent [...]
If you’ve ever wondered just how the decision-making process which caused countless (supposedly) intelligent financial analysts to buy into securitized subprime mortgages and then cause the global economy to tank, a recent Dilbert might just have the answer: I think “it’s called math” and “I feel all savvy” pretty much wrap it up. For those [...]
(Hat tip: Bill, who works for the government, so he technically fits the bill here)
Would you like to see some very sad graphs that illustrate why our financial system is in such dire straits? Of course you do. (HT: Lisa X) What the blue line above shows is how much banks have borrowed from the Fed (the Fed’s BORROW index). You’ll notice (or maybe you won’t because of the [...]
There is a “black market” that evolves to sell currency (b/c they don’t trust the fiat or official currency values) That black market is being carried out in the Classified ads of your country’s newspapers HT: Marginal Revolutions: In the classifieds on the web of the daily Iceland newspaper Mbl, you find hard currency for [...]
I’ve been sharing a lot of these posts (along with my oh-so-witty commentary) through my Google Reader feed (why haven’t you subscribed yet?), but a recent question posed to me by Lester about what has been going on in Wall Street has inspired me to make this — a list of blog posts/news articles/comics/commentary from [...]