Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Asymptosis: always approaching

  • Mitt Romney in the Big Banks’ Pocket? Pas Possible

    From OpenSecrets, hat tip to John Sides at The Monkey Cage: Cross-posted at Angry Bear. Related posts: The Myth of the “Independent” Voter The Macroeconomics of Chinese Kleptocracy Screw the Rich to Protect Super-Rich Campaign Contributors? John Galt, “Genocidal Prick” Do Savers “Take Resources out of Society”?

  • Deep and Long: Private Debt and Financial Recessions

    While he (uncharacteristically) doesn’t explain or deploy it terribly well, Paul Krugman points to some very excellent research on the relationship between private debt levels and the depth and duration of (especially financial-crisis-driven) recessions. The Schularick/Taylor Vox EU article is here. The Jorda/Schularick/Taylor paper is here (PDF). I think the work is excellent in large part because JS&T…

  • “No, the shareholders don’t own the corporation”

    The excellent Justin Fox makes the excellent point that I have made many times: that nobody in the ecosystem of publicly traded companies — including shareholders — is anything like a business owner. And no, the shareholders don’t own the corporation — they own securities that give them a not very well-defined stake in its earnings, and the…

  • Amazon and Apple: The Myth of the Rational Market?

    Can anybody explain this to me? AAPL AMZN Price/Earnings 15.15 302.68 That’s a 20:1 ratio. Yes, Amazon has a lower price to revenues ratio, by a 2:1 margin. AAPL AMZN Price/Sales 4.06 2.06 And presumably at some point Amazon can turn the prices-versus-market-share dial away from gaining market share/maximizing revenue and toward price and profits.…

  • Should Central Banks Burn All Their Government Bonds?

    In June of 2008, Ron Paul made a radical proposal: the Fed should simply burn all the U.S. Treasuries it’s currently holding, reducing the government (U.S. Treasury) debt by $1.6 trillion, or about 10%. (Yes: bonds held by the Fed are counted as part of “Debt Held by the Public,” even though the government basically…

  • Why Unwinding QE Won’t Matter

    Ashwin Parameswaran nails it once again. If you want to understand how the modern financial/monetary system actually works, run don’t walk to read this post. His key insight: Just as the East India Company could access cash on the back of their government bond holdings in the 18th century, any pension fund, insurer or bank can do…

  • Adam Smith on Corporatism

    As a many-times business owner, I noted a couple of years back that in the ecosystem of publicly traded companies, there is nobody who thinks, acts, has incentives like, or is really anything like a real business owner. I’m pleased to find that Adam Smith agrees with me (emphasis mine): The trade of a joint stock…

  • “If you tax investment income what will people do? Stuff their money in the mattress?”

    Richard Thaler asks exactly the right question. This from the latest IGM Forum poll of big-name economists, on the effects of taxing income from “capital.” I’ve been over this multiple times before, but it’s nice to see the thinking validated by a real economist. If you’ve got money, there is no (practicable) alternative to “investing” it. (Those are irony…

  • Did Global Warming “Stop” Sixteen Years Ago?

    An acquaintance of mine who’s very statistically savvy (and quite conservative) posted the following link on Facebook today. I replied as follows (I’ve replaced a link here with a clickable image): As a statistics guy, you know way better than most how important sample size is. There was a 30-year plateau in the HADCRUT data, mid-40s…

  • GDP, Prosperity, The Wealth Effect, and Marginal Propensity to Consume

    Comes to mind: the one about the two British ladies who meet at the Ascot races. “My dear,” says the first. “What a lovely hat. Where did you get it?” “Oh darling,” says the second, looking somewhat pained, “don’t you know, we have our hats.” It comes to mind as I ponder the rather grudging and tepid suggestions…

  • 57% of Leading Economists are Not Worried About an Inflationary Wage/Price Spiral

    8% are. 23% are uncertain or have no opinion. I really like this IGM panel (check out the roster — pretty damned impressive, or at least credentialed), but I wish they didn’t post such wishy-washy, softball questions. I post this one because it’s not. The one I’d really like them to ask: A modern, prosperous…

  • The Money Confusion

    The always-brilliant J. W. Mason’s response to what in my opinion is a quite befuddled Mike Beggs review in Jacobin of David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years prompts me to tackle a subject that I’ve been worrying at for a long time: Money. I’ve been worrying at it despite (or because of) endless reading spanning…

  • Repeat After Me: Low Taxes (on Rich People) and Economic Growth Are Not Correlated

    Jared Bernstein tells us yet again what the data has been telling us forever (my bold): I agree with Chye-Ching Huang, who agrees with the Congressional Research Service, Len Burman, and me: over the long, historical record of special tax treatment for investment incomes and tax cuts to the top marginal tax rates, one simply doesn’t find significant correlations with…

  • Keynes: Pragmatist. Hayek: Utopian. Who Sez?

    …if you read about the tussle between the two great economists, you are struck by two things. First, how pragmatic a man John Maynard Keynes was. And second, how utopian the ideals of Friedrich Hayek are. This is odd, as each man attached himself to a polar opposite political philosophy: Keynes’s ideas were adopted by idealistic lefties,…

  • The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy

    I’ve spent a lot of time considering (here, here, here, and here) the notions of technological unemployment and the Luddite Fallacy: the idea that technologically driven productivity — machines — will replace, are replacing, human labor. I’d like to revisit that here. My basic conclusion: the Luddites were obviously wrong at the time. But they’re…

  • Laffer: Laughable As Always

    R Davis spends a whole lot of words (and numbers) explaining why Arthur Laffer’s latest WSJ editorial is false and ridiculous, but those who think about data — at all — really only need to read one line. Laffer’s key error — which a high-school statistics student could spot — is to: compare growth in…

  • No, Conservatives Aren’t Happier — Any More

    My small effort to ameliorate the disparity in Andrew Gelman’s headline: 1.5 million people were told that extreme conservatives are happier than political moderates. Approximately .0001 million Americans learned that the opposite is true. Andrew is commenting on Jay Livingston’s great takedown of David Arthur Brooks’ recent column asking “Who is happier about life — liberals or conservatives?”…

  • Red-Ink Republicans, Revisited and Reviled

    The post-New Deal Republican party has delivered endless strings of deficits and debt. That is their historic legacy to America, the bare fact on the ground that unfortunately requires endless repetition to impart the reality, and counter the tea-party fantasy of fiscally irresponsible Democrats. Also required is a catchy moniker that encapsulates that reality: Red-Ink Republicans…

  • Red-State Teat-Sucking Rendered Invisible. Conservatives Howl Tyranny.

    In response to this graphic in my reprised post from yesterday: Commenter rjs points us to this depressing Economist post — the government data source for this graphic has gone dark, part of the Obama administration’s cost-cutting measures. The real irony I discover, though, is to find right-wingers at The Heritage Foundation screaming about the Obama…

  • Karl Smith: Why Is The US Government Still Collecting Taxes? THE DEFICIT EARNS A PROFIT!!!

    I hesitate to excerpt from this because it says it all so well and so briefly. But: …the more taxes the US government collects, the more money it loses. When the US government declines to sell a 10 year Treasury bill at a real rate interest rate of –0.57 percent it is agreeing to pay,…

  • Are Conservatives Deluded About Their Happiness?

    Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute does the usual uninformed thing this week in his NYT op-ed, Conservatives Are Happier, and Extremists Are Happiest of All. He cites the well-known and long-standing research showing that conservatives report themselves to be happier than liberals. (I was not aware, though, that moderates are the least happy…