J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2209

Krugman's Improbable History: 1938 in 2010

Paul Krugman:

1938 in 2010: we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out. And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s...

Nick Rowe: If You Set Out to Quantitatively Ease, Then by God, Sir!--Quantitatively Ease!

Normal open market operations swap cash for short-term government bonds, and so affect the short, nominal, safe interest rate. But when the short, nominal safe interest rate is zero, central-bank open market operations are simply swapping one zero-interest safe government asset for another: it is hard to see why they should matter. If the Federal Reserve wants its actions to matter, it needs to swap cash for assets that are not short, nominal, and safe.

Nick Rowe remembers the dictum of...

The Privatization of UCLA's Business School Is Underway

Mathew Garrahan:

UCLA business school to end public funding: A leading business school in the University of California system is preparing to forgo public funding amid increasing uncertainty about the state’s economic health and California’s ability to pay for higher education. The UCLA Anderson School of Management plans to fill the funding gap with money from private donors, bolstering a roster that includes business figures such as Larry Fink, the founder of BlackRock, and Bill Gross...

Last Week for Obama to do Recess Appointments This Summer...

That is all.

Labor Day, 1894

From Slouching Towards Utopia:

Once the people—the adult, male, white people that is—had the vote, what were they going to do with it?

The coming of (male, white) democracy in the North Atlantic was all mixed up with the coming of modern industry—the move out of agriculture and into industrial and service occupations—the coming of the modern city (the move from the farm to someplace more densely populated), and the coming of heightened within-nation income inequality.

America in 1776...

Eric Rauchway on the Bretton Woods Conference

The summer after my first year of graduate school I went back for the last extended time to my parents' home in Washington DC. Joe Pechman, IIRC, got me a desk at the Brookings Institution. And I spent the summer reading as widely as I could and having coffee with Edward Bernstein.

Eric Rauchway:

Keynes’s conference and Morgenthau’s dream: Keynes looks arrogantly at the camera. The qualities of authority, brilliance, and suavity, which Keynes had in personal abundance, were if not...

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

The Editor-in-Chief of the New Republic, Marty Peretz:

The New York Times Laments "A Sadly Wary Misunderstanding Of Muslim-Americans." But Really Is It "Sadly Wary" Or A "Misunderstanding" At All?: Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy...

Scott Sumner Makes a Mistake: Monetary Economics

Scott writes:

TheMoneyIllusion » A few of my mistakes: 9. I predicted that aggressive QE would raise long term interest rates, a view which seemed to be refuted by the response on T-bond yields to the March 2009 Fed QE announcement....

I’d like to talk about number 9 for a moment.  Any effective monetary stimulus would be expected to raise long term rates.  We have plenty of examples of that occurring.  My favorite is the surprise stimulus announcement of January 3, 2001, which...

Management

A Manager, courtesy of Conor Friedersdorf:

About My Job: The Businessman: A reader writes:

I work for one of the world's largest multinationals, in a position that makes my job description basically "business" - I work on issues touching finance, marketing, logistics, etc. I am also someone who spent most of their working life outside of the business world. So I would like to give some examples of things about business that I have found surprising.

...

The Bush Administration's Third-Biggest Mistake (and Now the Obama Administration's Mistake too)

Fareed Zakaria:

Zakaria: Why America Overreacted to 9/11: Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one...