J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2232

New Unemployment Insurance Claims Are Not Falling

Ruth Mantell:

Initial jobless claims rise 2,000 to 484,000 - MarketWatch: The number of initial claims for regular state unemployment insurance benefits rose 2,000 to 484,000 in the week ended August 7, reaching the highest level since February, the Labor Department reported Thursday...

Stan Collender: Six Questions About the Politics of the Deficit

Stan Collender has an excellent piece:

Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > Six essential questions about the deficit, Wall Street and Washington:

For almost two decades we’ve been told that when you’re looking for signs of what Wall Street wants Washington to do about the federal budget, the bond market is the place to watch. What’s the bond market saying today? The bond market is... unequivocal... the bond market today is exhibiting no worries about the deficit or federal borrowing at...

First Draft of August 30 Principles of Macroeconomics Introductory Lecture

1.1. Introduction to Macroeconomics

Half of the first-year economics college curriculum is microeconomics--the study of individual workers, investors, firms, markets, and industries in our economy. Half of the first-year economics curriculum is macroeconomics--the study of issues that cannot be analyzed properly without considering the economy as a whole. It is conventional to start with the micro half. We are going to start with the macro half--given the big recession outside and the high...

links for 2010-08-11

Ezra Klein - House passes state aid bill -- but is it enough?

Ezra Klein: House passes state aid bill -- but is it enough?: http://tinyurl.com/dl20100811d #worthreading





If Dems Keep The House, Thank The GOP Crazies | The New Republic

Chait: If Dems Keep House, Thank GOP Crazies: http://tinyurl.com/dl20100811c #worthreading





Eschaton

Duncan Black...

David Dayen: Politico won the wkd with story abt how the House might not have votes to pass the state aid bill http://politi.co/du7dar it passed 247-161

David Dayen:

Twitter: Politico won the wkd with story abt how the House might not have votes to pass the state aid bill http://politi.co/du7dar it passed 247-161

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Human Demography and the Power of 2^n

Jason Kuznicki asks a question:

I Learned It on Wikipedia:

Using mathematical models, it is easy to demonstrate that every human being alive today is likely to be a direct descendant of Confucius, even using mathematical models that assume an extremely small amount of cross cultural mating, since any human alive today would have had 1.5 sextillion ancestors alive at the time of Confucius, over a quadrillion times more than the population of the earth at the time, making...

Josh Marshall: A Lot of I Told You Sos

From Josh Marshall:

Lot of I Told You Sos: A lot of other people know the economics better than I do. But my God there were a lot of folks earlier this year arguing, very convincingly, that the move away from stimulus to inflation-worry and retrenchment was little short of insane given the mammoth economic crisis the country was weathering. It had all the hallmarks, though on a much speeded-up basis, of the move to slash spending in 1937, which had terrible consequences for the US...

This Is Indeed a Gloomy Day: Department of Macroeconomic Policy

In a liquidity trap conventional monetary policy--the swapping of highly-liquid bank reserve cash for short-term government securities--is ineffective because the macroeconomic financial market imbalance is not a shortage of cash relative to demand but rather a shortage of high-quality (and perhaps long-duration) assets relative to demand. The private sector's finances are sufficiently shaky that it cannot create high-quality assets--if it could, we wouldn't have a problem. (And a private...

Live at the New York Times

Should We Brace for Deflation Now?

Robert Gibbs Doubles Down Yet Again

Repeated plays of double-or-nothing are the road to bankruptcy, Robert.

As I said before, what Robert Gibbs should be saying is:

I apologize for expressing my point inartfully, confusingly, and misleadingly. Of course we hear the frustration. We understand it. We are frustrated too. Large pieces of our agenda have been completely stalled by procedural obstacles in the legislature. Large pieces have been enacted in imperfect form. We agree: the glass is not full. We have not done...