Monthly Archives: June 2011

Some people like a fine wine or a top-rated meal.  This blog likes a good study looking at potential deteriorations in the job matching function.  Instead of “foodie”, call us “structies.” This blog summarized a bunch of the research surrounding … Continue reading →

In the wake of recent bad employment numbers, people are looking for options to boost the economy. Some have proposed another round of quantitative easing to get us back to the normal rate of growth. I interviewed Joe Gagnon, Senior Fellow at the … Continue reading →

David Dayen has an excellent catch-up in the American Prospect on where Washington is on short-term stimulus versus deficit cutting/austerity in the debt ceiling battle: One only needs to look to Britain, which cut $180 billion from its budget last … Continue reading →

- Wesley Yang’s n+1 piece The Face of Seung-Hui Cho is now available as a $2 Amazon Kindle Single. It’s an amazing, disquieting and challenging, work, focused on his identification with the disturbed college mass murderer’s face and Yang’s own history of … Continue reading →

Arpit Gupta, For More Corporate Raiders: (my bold): There’s welcome news that a hedge fund operator – David Einhorn – has bought up large chunks of Microsoft with the intent of forcing the ouster of the CEO Steve Ballmer, presumably … Continue reading →

Raghuram Rajan has a post on monetary policy and QE2 at Project Syndicate titled Money Magic (h/t Reihan Salam). A friend pointed out that post-crisis conservative economists talking about monetary policy in general, and QE2 specifically, is like watching a … Continue reading →

Krugman has a fantastic op-ed about creditors and our current economic malaise, Rule by Rentiers: What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost … Continue reading →

A friendly reminder that a lot of our 2010 discussion of unemployment was guided by overestimated job vacancy numbers. This lead economic commentators to think that there were a lot of open jobs throughout 2010 that people were unable to … Continue reading →

Oh dear god.  Sorry to start with two long block-quotes, but they are important and upsetting.  Zachary Goldfarb, Washington Post, Geithner Finds His Footing: Lawrence Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council, and Christina Romer, then the chairwoman of … Continue reading →

I’m sure you’ve heard that Nobel-Prize winning MIT economist Peter Diamond is withdrawing his name from nomination to the Federal Reserve, leaving Democrats and liberals frustrated with the lack of movement on nominees. People are shocked that it has come … Continue reading →