Paul Krugman's Blog, page 630

What's moving interest rates?

I've written recently about applying the Engel-Frankel method to making sense of interest rate movements: ask what else moves when rates move, and you get a clue to what's driving the changes. I've previously argued that the behavior of commodity prices suggests that the big rise in interest rates this spring was driven by economic [...:]

Competition, redefined

Great catch by Digby, who quotes Sen. Blanche Lincoln about how terrible it would be if a government-run insurance plan undermined free-market competition, then links to this:
The Justice Department considers an industry to be "highly concentrated" if one company has 42 percent of the market. In Arkansas - Senator Lincoln should take note - Blue [...:]

Climate change fantasies

A while back I wrote about anti-green economics - the insistence, by opponents of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that the economic cost of cap-and-trade would be immense and unsupportable. I cited Robert Samuelson, who ridiculed the Environmental Defense Fund for suggesting that major action on greenhouse gases would only cost a dime a [...:]

Live long and prosper

Via Andrew Gelman, Greg Mankiw describes the use of international comparisons of life expectancy as part of the argument for reform as "schlocky."
Grrr. Not many serious advocates of reform use the life expectancy differences to argue that health care is clearly better in other advanced countries than it is in the United States; when [...:]

The Froomkin firing

I'm a bit late on this, but the Washington Post has fired Dan Froomkin, of the White House Watch blog.
On the face of it, it's a puzzling decision. Aside from the excellence of Froomkin's work, he's popular with readers. On sheer business grounds, why drop him?
OK, I have no idea about the actual decision process. [...:]

A bit more on too big to fail and related

My post on TBTF should be read as part of a larger debate - over what it takes to have a relatively crisis-free banking system.
One point of view is that the trick is to purge all the moral hazard from the system, and then the self-interest of the market will take care of things. [...:]

Too big to fail FAIL

Too big to fail, even in 1982
I'm a big advocate of much strengthened financial regulation. One argument I don't buy, however, is that we should try to shrink financial institutions down to the point where nobody is too big to fail. Basically, it's just not possible.
The point is that finance is deeply interconnected, so [...:]

Hanging tough with Keynes

There's an interesting counterpoint between Christina Romer's new piece in the Economist on the lessons of 1937 and the poll results, which are alarming some commentators, showing that a majority of Americans give deficit reduction a higher priority than rescuing the economy.
First of all, Ms. Romer's point - that a premature return to orthodoxy can [...:]

Making charts (for curious readers)

When you see a chart on this blog that's a blue background, it's probably from Fred 2, the terrific data source run by the St. Louis Fed. Fred not only draws your charts, it lets you resize them (using the Edit Chart feature) so that they fit in the blog window. Everyone interested in economics [...:]

Taking the Hypocritical Oath

I know it's a tough competition, but this just might be the most hypocritical thing I've seen in the past year:
On Monday, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Pat Roberts (R-KS) introduced the "Preserving Access to Targeted, Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services (PATIENTS) Act of 2009," a new bill prohibiting Medicare [...:]