J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2318

More on Clinton-Era Regulation of Derivatives

James Kwak writes:

What Did Robert Rubin Think About Derivatives?: First Bill Clinton said he got bad advice from Robert Rubin on derivatives. Then a Clinton adviser issued a statement essentially taking it back and blaming Alan Greenspan. (Jennifer Taub discussed some of the substantive issues on this blog.) Dan Froomkin asked Rubin, who said, “I thought we should regulate derivatives; I thought so when I was at Goldman Sachs and I thought so afterwards.” But Froomkin points out that...

My Utility Level Is Lower This Morning...

... Because Mark Thoma has an iPad 3G...

Once Again, I Am Surrounded by Turkeys...

Posted via web from delong's posterous

links for 2010-04-30

Joh Siracusa: Apple's wager

JS: "Like the Mac, the iPhone debuted with a huge technical lead over its competitors. But this time, Apple is determined not to squander its advantage... it's front-running as hard as it possibly can. Anything that has any chance of slowing down "the progress of the platform" has simply got to go... controlling its own destiny... no middleware vendors, no encouragement of cross-platform development... complete, arbitrary control...

Methinks It Is Time to Jailbreak the iPhone and the iPad...

Mostly for fun, but also because a lack of officially-sanctioned internet tethering is sometimes annoying.

Any suggestions or advice?

Mark Gongloff of the Wall Street Journal Is Simply Wrong

He writes::

Warning Signal on U.K. Debt?: As investors scramble to protect themselves from the next credit flare-up in Europe, their worries are spreading to the U.K. Investors bought a net $443 million of credit-default swaps to insure against a U.K. default last week, according to data compiled by the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp., taking the total outstanding to $8.2 billion....

That was easily the biggest gain among sovereign borrowers. The size of protection on the U.K...

Obama the Centrist

We are live at Project Syndicate: Obama the Centrist:

BERKELEY – Despite the frequent cries of American Republicans that Barack Obama is trying to bring European-style socialism to the United States, it is now very clear that the US president wishes to govern from one place and one place only: the center.

In fighting the recession, Obama decided early on that he would push for a fiscal stimulus program about half the size of what his Democratic economic advisers recommended, and he...

Inside Apple Computer's Walled Garden

Charlie Stross:

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash: My take on the iPhone OS, and the iPad, isn't just that they're the start of a whole new range of Apple computers that have a user interface.... Rather, they're a hugely ambitious attempt to keep Apple relevant to the future of computing, once Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland. The App Store and the iTunes Store have taught Steve Jobs that ownership of the...

Paul Krugman on why Britons should vote for the Labour Pa...

Paul Krugman on why Britons should vote for the Labour Party with Gordon Brown at it's head: "that should be Gordon Brown's slogan: 'He kept us out of the euro.' And that's the saving grace of the situation."

Knaves or Fools? Why Choose?

Matthew Yglesias, I think, gets one wrong. He says that Steve Spuriell is not a knave but merely a fool:

Matthew Yglesias: Stephen Spuriell on Student Loans: One major analytic error I think liberals tend to make is vastly overstating the level of dishonesty among conservative pundits, analysts, advocates, etc.... [T:]he overwhelming majority of smart people with conservative political opinions are working as businessmen.... So you’re left with a kind of denuded population in terms of...