The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Twittering Obama’s Speech

Continuing my Book of Job-style woes — e.g., the antlered jihadi that destroyed my car — today our local Internet provider crashed just as President Obama was beginning his Ohio speech. Through the miracle of Twitter, however, I was able to offer commentary via cell phone: Between having my car totalled — the insurance company […]

Economics, Politics and Propaganda

If the New York Times is going to add an economist as a columnist, who do you think they’re going to pick? Perhaps someone like Thomas Sowell, whose free-market arguments could balance the neo-Keynesianism of Paul Krugman? Of course not. They bring aboard Peter Orszag, who until recently was Obama’s director of the White House […]

Seniority as a Liability

“The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an ‘up or out’ profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment.” This is true in many other professions, notoriously including sales. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was, after all, a story about a […]

‘Stalled Recovery’

That’s the the L.A. Times euphemism for “depression”: Downward revision of GDP growth a strong signal of stalled recovery The Commerce Department on Friday downgraded the nation’s economic growth in the second quarter, providing the most important evidence yet that the recovery has stalled. The anemic annualized growth rate of 1.6% was down from last […]

I Remember That Flick

by Smitty Power Line points to possibly self-referential research showing that Americans are stupid, based upon doubts about elected leadership. The astroturf seems to work as follows: . . .Egan thinks Republicans are dumb. But let’s take a closer look. His 46 percent is an unpublished number from a Time magazine survey that is described […]

‘We May Be Incompetent, But We Are
All You Have Got’ Is An Increasingly Feckless Argument

by Smitty (h/t Insty) Conglomerate Blog has a doom-tastic post about how New Jersey is being sued by the SEC for creating a situation where bond investors were not provided adequate information to evaluate the state’s ability to fund the pensions or assess their impact on the state’s financial condition. How can this be a […]

‘Free Money’ Madness at the Fed

For more than 18 months, the Federal Reserve has kept its funds rate at effectively zero — a policy of monetary stimulus so extreme that it would have been unimaginable a few years ago. This policy was instituted as an “emergency rate” after the 2008 meltdown, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig said […]

It’s FDIC Bank Failure Friday!

Associated Press: Regulators have shut down two Florida banks and one in Virginia, lifting to 113 the number of U.S. bank failures this year. That count evidently omits today’s announced closure of Chicago’s ShoreBank. Bloomberg News reports: ShoreBank Corp., the Chicago lender operating under a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. cease-and- desist order for 13 months, […]

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