Unqualified Offerings

You probably don’t have enough to worry about regarding the economy, so read Fester on the possibility that the move to defined-contribution pensions may exacerbate swings in the labor market – when times are tough, 401(k) values fall, encouraging workers near retirement age to work longer; when times are good, 401(k) values rise, encouraging older [...]

Paul Krugman says the world’s financial poobahs hang together this weekend, or we all hang separately. Someone’s blawg today explained the greater utility of recapitalizing banks rather than buying the "toxic waste," better than any of the arguments I’d heard from politicians or commentators previously. It comes back to leverage. Right now banks are overleveraged [...]

Yglesias brings the snark. Will Wilkinson points out that, since money spent on the military really is real money and such threats as America faces simply don’t require a military budget remotely as large as the one we have, it’s the perfect pool of dough to repurpose toward whatever social-welfare spending you care to make. [...]

Dead Gus Hall ‘08 poster.

By Thoreau
Forwarded to me by a colleague:

From a freshman physics quiz given at Princeton a few days ago:
Problem 1. A famous thought experiment in economics involves dealing with a financial crisis by dropping money from a helicopter.

Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman and former Princeton Economics Professor, decides to try this [...]

By Thoreau
Beware them both and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.
There has always been an ignorant element and there always will be.  However, to see the ignorant element so skillfully rallied by people in [...]

By Thoreau
Ordinary people with zero connection to terrorism were spied on by the NSA. But, of course, impeachment must be “off the table.”
To the NSA person reading this site: I know that collecting 30 pieces of silver is far more important than, say, being a decent human being who refuses to collaborate with [...]