Political Economy

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently defended the Federal Reserve’s low-interest rate monetary policy which preceded the housing bubble in the United States. Bernanke instead pointed to a lack of regulatory controls as the major…

Reading the news today, I came across an NPR article that I believe captured the political mood in the U.S. rather well.  While the stress of the article is on disillusionment from Obama’s base of supporters, I believe much the same…

This is a post which I originally published at New Deal 2.0. Ed mentioned earlier today in the links that I was going to post to add some variety to the discussions at Credit Writedowns. So, here is an article on Spain and the EU which…

The White House Stands Behind Geithner, Says Tim Was Not Involved In AIG Email Fiasco is the headline of a recent post at Zero Hedge. Barack Obama is standing behind Tim Geithner. I remain unconvinced. This is the second time Secretary…

In handwriting: Note that there should be no discussion or suggestion that AIG and the NY Fed are asking to structure anything else at this point. It will be enlightening to hear him explain what this statement means. See…

I want to talk about the drubbing the Democrats are going to take in this year’s elections and what it means, if anything.  As a sort of pre-amble, I will lead into this with some thoughts on tax cut propaganda and today’s piece by the…

I wrote a post earlier today on kleptocracy and the one-party system of government that I thought was pretty explicit.  But, judging from the comments, particularly at Naked capitalism, apparently I have to spell it out – tell readers…

As a writer, Matt Taibbi is a lot more vitriolic than I am. He curses, makes some pretty over-the-top personal attacks, and divines a policymaker’s intent where I don’t think he can. But, this goes mostly to style.  Substantively…

Hat tip FiveThirtyEight. once you remove the U.S., there's a strong correlation between spending and life expectancy, and this is super-clear from the scatterplot. For more information behind this chart, click the link below.…

Hat tip Prieur du Plessis. Source Chip Bok, 28 Dec 2009 - Comics.com