From week-before-last’s Economist, the Buttonwood column: Wealth consists of the goods and products we wish to consume or of things (factories, machinery, an educated workforce) that give us the ability to produce more such goods and services. Financial assets arise from the desire to postpone consumption so that money can be saved, either for precautionary [...]
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual rankings of global economic competitiveness last month, and it turns out that the USA is no longer the most competitive global economy. The World Economic Forum today released its annual rankings of global economic competitiveness, and Switzerland knocked the United States out of its No. 1 spot. [...]
Felix Salmon finds the”Art museum discount rate datapoint of the day”: It seems that the Long Beach Museum of Art would rather lose $569,000 in annual operating support from the city of Long Beach than repay the principal on a $3.06 million loan. I find that hard to understand: it should just take the $569,000 [...]
Paul Krugman writes a detailed (layman’s) critique on how and why economists messed up: Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists [...]
The WSJ‘s Economic Editor David Wessel speaks: addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fblog.arnavsheth.net%2F2009%2F09%2F01%2Ffaster-than-expected-recovery%2F’; addthis_title = ‘Faster-Than-Expected+Recovery%3F’; addthis_pub = ”;
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In an article entitled ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, Don Bodreaux gives a simple model to value each Beatle: If each viewer of only The Beatles’ first two “Sullivan” appearances deposited $1 into an account in return for watching The Beatles on these telecasts, this account would have had in it, on Feb. 16, 1964, $143.7 [...]
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT, talks at TED in 2008. The talk, according to the official bio, is about the following: Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as [...]
This morning’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) report suggested that the downturn has slowed. They showed a 1% decrease in GDP in the second quarter of 2009. Compared with a drop of 6.4% in the first quarter of this year, and a drop of 5.4% in the fourth quarter of last year, this decrease signals [...]
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Apparently Tim Geithner can’t sell his house, and this brought his house – not him – onto the Daily Show, with Robert Shiller making a cameo. It starts by describing the thawing real estate market but noting a “tragic tale” about “a family forced to move when the father had to take a job in [...]
The Fed is actually making a few bucks off this recession – at least on its balance sheet. It’s mostly from the interest income it is earning by buying all those instruments (low-return Treasuries, from open-market operations, and high-return “toxic” assets from banks). Let’s hope it doesn’t spend it all in one place… Last year [...]