Category Archives: Politics

Comic Relief (Bush and Democracy)

I trust you will enjoy this. The Brits carry off deadpan so much more successfully than we do.

The Fed Favors Its Friends

So much for our belief in the independence of the Fed. Cactus at Angry Bear has done a series of analyses on money supply growth in the months preceding an election, his latest being, “The Fed, Presidential Elections, and Coincidence – Part 5.” When the Fed chair is of the same party as the incumbent, […]

The Anger of the Right

An article in The Guardian online by Kevin Baker, “The right kind of anger,” seeks to probe the psyche of the right, specifically its fondness for vitriolic anger. Baker observes that the Anne Coulters of the world are back to their old slash and burn ways, despite the fact that those very same tactics didn’t […]

How Income Inequality Changed: Clinton Vs. Bush

This is a fascinating little bit of analysis in, of all place, Mother Jones, where James Galbraith gives us “Bush’s Beltway Boom.” In it, he describes how the people at the top of the food chain (the top 1% that everyone is getting so upset about) has changed in the Bush years from the Clinton […]

Australia’s Subservience to the US

A blistering piece by John Pilger in The New Statesman,”Australia: the new 51st state” shows how far prime minister John Howard has gone in pandering to US interests, whether or not they serve Australia. An illustration: Australia joined the “coalition of the willing” even though 93% of the population was opposed to the war. Pilger […]

Hillary Bashing as Spectator Sport

For the record, I’m not a fan of the junior senator from New York. But she actually said some sensible things in a letter to Henry Paulson, which were mischaracterized by Harvard prof Greg Mankiw on his popular blog (and picked up by Angry Bear). It is remarkable how Clinton can serve as a lightening […]

A Silver Lining to the Rout in the Stock Markets

No way will Bush do anything seriously hostile towards Iran with the markets in a fragile state.

Budgets and Democracy

UC Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong in his blog has a recurrent item, “Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps?” One of today’s posts, “Where Is the Budget Reporting?” nominally falls in that category, but points to something more serious. DeLong cites Stan Collender’s lament that no one, really no one, is covering the […]

Markets Not Taking Iran Attack Threat Seriously

As readers doubtless know, the efficient market hypothesis states that prices of publicly traded securities incorporate all available information. We’ve also commented on the wide spread evidence that (except for the subprime sector) investors have a pretty cheery outlook these days. The US stock market has had a nice run so far this year, with […]

Wall Street Journal Editorial Mischaracterizes AMT Woes

We’ve noted before that the Journal’s editorial pages are not the place to go if you want reality-based commentary. This piece, “Wall Street Journal AMT Editorial,” from Linda Beale on ataxingmanner (which came to our attention via Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View) dissects a recent WSJ editorial on the alternative minimum tax, or AMT. For readers […]

It’s Official: Democratic Presidents Produce Better Growth

So says Washington Monthly in “Red and Blue Economies,” citing some work by Cactus at Angry Bear. In his five part series on ” God Punishes Us When We (Collectively) Vote Republican” (here is part five) Cactus uses as his measure real GDP growth (growth less the increase in national debt) and determines that this […]

Presidents’ Day Quote

Courtesy Scott Horton at the Huffington Post (read entire piece here): Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death […]

Oil in Focus Again

Here we’ve had a few months of favorable oil prices, and as a result, oil has taken a back burner to other stories. It’s beginning to come to the fore, mainly in not-positive ways. We have two items today, one a very good post on Econbrowser, “Saudi Oil Production Cuts,” and what they might say […]

Are the Democrats Finally Developing Some Nerve?

Better late than never, I suppose. Here we have a president whose policies, particularly on Iraq, were thorougly repudiated in the Congressional midterm elections and who continues to get a vote of no confidence from the electorate, via terrible approval ratings. Yet he carries on as if he had a mandate. But all the Democrats […]