J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2299

Congestion Pricing: Ryan Avent Takes Slate and Matt DeBord to Econ 1 School

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

This is, I think, yet another example of the global Slate failure: they tried to copy Michael Kinsley's early New Republic trick of attracting readers by being contrarian and edgy and counterintuitive. But when Kinsleyism worked--which wasn't always, and which got rarer and rarer over time--the primary source of its success wasn't that it was contrarian and edgy and counterintuitive, but that it was smart. And Slate has found that it is a lot...

Morning Bulletin: Peaceable Kingdom Edition

Well, a bobcat on the deck, deer on the driveway, and turkeys in the straw.

No pictures, however: the kingdom is not that peaceable...

Morning Bulletin: The Group of 30 Has Lost Its Collective Mind...

Paul Krugman blogs:

Martin Wolf Is Not A Serious Person : And neither am I. Wolf writes:

I have now lost faith in the view that giving the markets what we think they may want in future – even though they show little sign of insisting on it now – should be the ruling idea in policy.

Amen. Yet most of the men in the room where I’m now sitting believe the contrary. With a few exceptions, everyone is calling for fiscal austerity everywhere, right now.

Awesome.

As...

Newt Gingrich Contradicts Himself in the Same Sentence

He writes:

Newt Gingrich: I recognize the horror and the evil of the Nazi regime and nothing in my new book To Save America should be interpreted as a statement of moral equivalence between totalitarian regimes and the secular-socialist left. My intent instead was to define the scale of the challenge to classic American civilization posed by secular-socialism...

So Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama both pose equal threats to classic American civilization. Glad to have that out...

And Meg Whitman Is the Good Manager Among the Republican Candidates...

Taegan Goddardd:

Twitter / Taegan Goddard: Whitman denies her CA-Gov ...: Whitman denies her CA-Gov ads feature a border fence, except they do... http://pwire.at/9kulkT

Winston Churchill Liveblogs World War II: May 28, 1940:

Winston Churchill: May 28, 1940:

In the House of Commons: The House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies.

links for 2010-05-27

Jonathan Cohn on Health Care

JC: "I'm skeptical that, with a different set of decisions, the Democrats could have produced a substantially better law. Some of this is because of things I learned, or at least came to appreciate, only recently... the institutional constraints on legislation—the technical challenges of reconciliation, the accounting standards of the CBO, the nature of campaign finance—make the enactment of sweeping legislation nightmarishly...

Harold Meyerson on the Latest Pathology of Washington DC

Harold:

Harold Meyerson - Deficit hawks ignore the R-word: Of all the gaps between elite and mass opinion in America today, perhaps the greatest is this: The elites don't really believe we're still in recession. Or maybe, they just don't care. How else to explain the continual harping on the deficit by editorialists, centrist think tanks and the like when the nation is still enmeshed in the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? How else to understand the growing opposition...

Urk!!!!

This is not good. Not good at all. The "yell 'fire, fire!' in Noah's flood" wing of the Federal Reserve ought to be a lot smaller and quieter than this right now.

Annie Lowrey:

Three Fed Presidents Recommend Interest-Rate Increase: Today, the Federal Reserve released the minutes of its Board of Governors meetings to discuss the United States’ monetary policy in April. In February, all twelve Federal Reserve regional bank presidents requested to keep the primary credit rate at 0.75...

The Flight to Quality: Project Syndicate

The Flight to Quality - Project Syndicate: BERKELEY – In late May, the yield to maturity of the 30-year United States Treasury bond was 4.07% per year – down a full half a percentage point since the start of the month. That means that a 30-year Treasury bond had jumped in price by more than 15%. So a marginal investor was willing to pay more than 15% more cash and more than 30% more equities for US Treasury bonds at the end of the month than at the beginning. This signals a remarkable shift...