Caroline Baum

Government policy must be well-crafted in order to avoid negative unintended consequences that arise when the government inserts itself into the private sector. And this is where I am having a problem with the Obama Administration.…

As I write this, stock markets in the U.S. are in their final hour of a rather poor session. Selling seems to have been brought on by Microsoft's announcement that it is cutting jobs en masse for the first time ever. If you recall, Fred…

Greetings to all. This may be one of my last posts before Christmas. So forgive me by raining on your festivities with some dismal notes on the dismal science. And by the way, who ever called Economics a science? Economics seems more akin…

Now that the United States has cut its interest rates to Zero and Ben Bernanke has helicopters flying over Wall Street, the question is: what happens next and who's following the Fed to zero? There are a lot of different answers.

After yesterdays melt-up on the Fed's decision to go ZIRP and introduce quantitative and qualitative easing, things are a bit calmer today. Here's what I have. Enjoy. Ed

The big news today (at least in my mind) is the outsized jobless claims number of 573,000. This number confirms the view that the employment situation is worsening quite rapidly. I think we could see 7.2% unemployment next month given…

Caroline Baum had a good column today at Bloomberg in which she suggests central banks consider asset prices in monetary policy going forward. In the piece she quoted William White, a former economist from the Bank for International…

Snowbound Marshall is doing an admirable job running things while I sun myself in the Bahamas (rubbing it in, eh?). You may remember Marshall from his days as a writer for Prudent Bear. Please do comment on his posts as he will respond in…

Yesterday's big news came at the hearings in Washington D.C. where U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson did his best Donald Rumsfeld imitation, stonewalling Congress despite increasing anger at how the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is…

Robert Hall, the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which is the official arbiter of recession in the United States, has said the evidence is now "conclusive" that the U.S. is in recession. For me, that's pretty much…