Dean Baker thinks it’d be a good idea. (How about we let Dean pick the new CoS?)
The Next Treasury Secretary: What’s Their Track Record?
It would be a really bad start to his administration if President Obama picked a Treasury Secretary who shares a substantial part of the blame for the bubble economy and the financial [...]
Michael Bérubé. I won’t even try to summarize it, but here’s the opening graf.
Open letter to Governor Palin’s supporters
The election is over. It’s time to put our differences aside, come together as Americans, and reach out across the aisle in a spirit of bipartisanship. And so today I address myself to those of you who [...]
Some very nifty election-related graphs from Andrew Gelman. Here are a couple; there’s more where they came from.
A big falloff in Republican votes from young voters:
A general shift from R to D (notice that AZ is right on the line; no more support for McCain-2008 than for W-2004):
via Kieran Healy
Born November 5, 1893. Click the image above for more images (Wired). Still more here.
I’m pleased with Obama’s win, on balance, and certainly grateful to be out of earshot of Ms Palin for at least a few months. But let’s not get too carried away.
Can we talk about the real Obama now?
As things now stand, the election primarily represents the extremist center seizing power back from the extremist [...]
Presented as a public service.
Farhad Manjoo, Slate Magazine: How to kill time on the Web now that the election’s over
You’re welcome.
The Corner’s Mike Potemra.
The View from Harlem
It happened, almost too quickly, what everyone was waiting for. Is it really possible to sneak up on a crowd of many thousands of people? At 11 PM, the big-screen TV at the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem went very briefly silent, and [...]
Or so says the Boston Fed, disagreeing with the Minnesota Fed folks (see my earlier post). Here’s a summary; get the pdf here.
Looking Behind the Aggregates: A reply to “Facts and Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008, Working Paper No. QAU08-5, by Ethan Cohen-Cole, Burcu Duygan-Bump, Jose Fillat, and Judit Montoriol-Garriga, Federal Reserve [...]
Sam Wang, of the Princeton Election Consortium, weighs in with a final prediction of today’s vote.
Final predictions for 2008
PRESIDENT
Electoral vote: The final polling snapshot is Obama 352 EV, McCain 186 EV. The confidence bands are 68% [337,367] Obama EV, 95% [316,378] Obama EV.
Bias analysis: I expect cell phone users missing from landline surveys to give [...]
I’ve been on the road, so my long-anticipated first taste of this year’s Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale was a little late this year. SNCA is Sierra Nevada’s seasonal IPA, and each year we have a small variation on a familiar theme. This year’s SNCA is the most intense I can remember.
Pick some up for election [...]
Good for them.
John Wildermuth in the SF Chronicle:
The signs on the front lawn of former 49er quarterback Steve Young’s Peninsula home say “No on Prop. 8,” which normally wouldn’t be much of a story in the Bay Area, a gay-friendly region which is the center of opposition to the effort to ban same-sex marriage in the state.
But [...]
Thus Mike Meyers in the Star Tribune:
The nation indeed may be facing a financial crisis, with large institutions failing in the wake of multibillion debts, but most bank-lending to business customers actually has been on the rise.
“The story goes that they [banks] are holding on to the money or putting it into Treasury bills,” said [...]
via Open Left
One of the pleasures of an October visit to Minnesota is a visit to the local apple orchards. In large part, this is due to a century of apple breeding at the University of Minnesota, whose apple program reminds me of the wine-grape-breeding program at UC Davis, closer to where I live.
UMN’s latest blockbuster variety [...]
Bailing Out Homeowners: What Does It Mean?
…
As everyone should know now, the basic problem is that tens of millions of people (urged on by bankers, financial advisers, economists, and politicians) bought homes at bubble inflated prices. The bubble is now bursting so tens of millions of people now live in homes that are worth substantially [...]
Dean Baker.
The Recession Is Not Caused by the Credit Crunch!!!!!!!
NPR just reported on Morning Edition that the markets are plummeting because investors are realizing the seriousness of the damage caused by the credit crunch. This calls for an extra long arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The economy is not in a recession because of the credit crunch. The economy is [...]
Add Apple to the list of companies actively opposing California’s Proposition 8:
No on Prop 8
October 24, 2008
Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly [...]
Lots more where that came from, courtesy of Ben Bittrolff.
My takeaway: you don’t have to know much about economics (which I certainly don’t) to see that something very unusual is going on, and it hasn’t even started heading back to normal.