Economics

Marshall Auerback here again.  A lot of good questions surrounding my piece on the euro. Many of them seem to revolve around the issues of why the euro gets weaker when national governments deficit spend, and the issue of whether my…

Marshall Auerback here with a post which I originally published at New Deal 2.0. I wrote an earlier post called Spain: Deficit Terrorism in Action to explain some of the institutional flaws at the heart of the euro zone.  This post…

The Big Picture has picked up on what appears to be an interesting development over at the NBER’s site. It seems like they are hedging there bets on a possible double dip recession beginning in late 2010 or 2011. As you may know, the NBER…

In the wake of news about President Obama’s new Too Big to Fail Tax and Barry Ritholtz’s post on it, I had an in-depth conversation on the issue with a whole group of people, including Barry. Most of the group was all for the tax.  I…

On a number of occasions, I have pointed to the sectoral balances model of finance to help demonstrate what happens when the government sector runs a deficit or a surplus. A recent article in the Financial Times by Martin Wolf on Japan’s…

Calculated Risk has a post out today called Bubbles and Employment. The gist of the post is that interest rates play a role in creating bubbles as demonstrated by data on employment and common property yard-sticks like price-to-rent and…

Unadjusted jobless claims after the holiday season are always monstrous because of seasonality. Last week 645,571 people filed initial claims for unemployment insurance in the United States.  That is down from the 731,958 who filed at…

This quote from Caroline Baum sums things up pretty well about the Fed's complicity in blowing a massive bubble in housing and in stocks before it. I know Bernanke has given this issue a great deal of thought and devoted the Fed’s…

About three months ago, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman took a stab at explaining why economists didn’t anticipate the worst financial crisis in three-quarters of a century. His was a long piece, taking up eight pages and 6,000…

I wrote a post yesterday (The Fed’s exit strategy) to explain the mechanics surrounding Monday’s Federal Reserve announcement that it is offering CD accounts to banks. The Federal Reserve does not control the demand for credit and therefore…