All the hubub about global warming seems to have driven the other environmental slow-motion-train-wreck, species loss, out of the news and the popular imagination. The story in brief, as reported by the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in a Reuters story, “Humans spur worst extinctions since dinosaurs:” “In effect, we are currently […]
Read more...Cactus at Angry Bear has been on this trail for a while now (his latest is “The Fed, Presidential Elections, and Coincidence – Part 8“), and the Fed’s behavior has been consistent with what you’d expect if they were trying to influence Presidential elections. The entire post is very much worth reading, as are the […]
Read more...We now have proof that liberals are more productive. First, it has now been established that slobs are more productive. This article in Extreme Tech,”Are You a Slob? Good, You’re More Productive,” reports that tidiness actually wastes time: Karen Jackson would be the first to admit her desk looks like a disaster area. Her stacks […]
Read more...OK, I am being completely unfair, I just wanted to get your attention. The blog New Economist pointed me to a couple of posts by what it calls “the always readable Cato Institute gadfly Will Wilkinson” on the subject of happiness research. He finds most of it to be lousy. I have no doubt he […]
Read more...Some powerful organizations are taking up the banner of climate change. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, a group of influential investors, including Allainz, Calpers, and Merrill, ….waded into the fray, pressing for legislation mandating emissions cuts ranging from 60% to 90% by the middle of this century and requiring companies to disclose investor risks […]
Read more...Apologies for a light day; some family demands took precedence. Hope to have a more normal series tomorrow. A item in today’s Financial Times, “Unions vow to fight the ‘cancer’ of hedge funds,” may seem to be old news, labor versus capital, but there are some new elements in this story. First, the unions have […]
Read more...This article by Robert Franks, a Cornell economist, in today’s New York Times gives several simple but compelling examples of how conservative ideology is internally inconsistent. Conservatives like to claim that keeping government small is pro growth and makes us all better off, at least in a financial sense, by giving us a bigger economic […]
Read more...For the benefit of non-US readers, AMT stands for alternative minimum tax. When individuals take itemized deductions, they must also run an AMT calculation to see if the taxes due under that framework are higher than they’d get using income – (deductions + exemptions). The idea behind AMT originally was that high income individuals who […]
Read more...Private equity funds are under fire these days. Their very size and success is starting to work to their disadvantage as the great unwashed public becomes increasingly uncomfortable with their concentration of power. Witness the fact that, in the fight to acquire Texas utility TXU, suitors Texas Pacific and KKR made overtures to environmental groups […]
Read more...A New York Times story by Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Of Private Equity, Politics, and Income Taxes,” discussed pending legislation to change the tax treatment of private equity fees. A post on the blog Conglomerate (which is most assuredly not liberal, I would place it as centrist to somewhat right) has has a series of posts […]
Read more...Normally I try to limit my excursions into politics to items that have some relationship to finance, but I can’t resist certain juicy stories. And this one comes from an economics blog, Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, so I suppose I have an excuse. The specter of an entire room of grown men giving a standing […]
Read more...For those who may not know about him, Greg Palast is an award-winning journalist who does major investigative pieces for the BBC. He’s also an unapologetic Old Leftist, and has a strident writing style, but he delivers the goods. One of his areas of focus is voter fraud in the US. He broke the story […]
Read more...Although I must confess to not being a close observer of the Washington scene, even at my remove, it’s crystal clear that the Democrats haven’t been willing to take on Bush frontally. Polls show widespread opposition towards Bush’s Iraq policies, and all the Dems are willing to put forward is a wimpy two sentence non-binding […]
Read more...Robert Reich has an interesting post today, “Why China Announces Military Buildup the Same Week Paulson Visits,” about how China is pursuing inter-related economic and military strategies in its drive to become a superpower. Although much of what Reich says is cogent, I disagree with one point, namely, that “America’s indebtedness to China gives the […]
Read more...One robin does not make a spring, and one incident of over-the-top vituperation that is roundly denounced, even by people on the same team, does not yet indicate a shift in sentiment. But we can hope a little. Yesterday I wrote a post on the anger of the right. By happenstance, it was shortly after […]
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