links for 2008-03-02

• Banks May Shrink by $2 Trillion on Subprime Losses - WSJ Economics Blog
• Blindsided by the future - Charlie Stross
• Iraq: The Three Trillion Dollar War - Open Left
• The John and Cindy McCain Foundation - Angry Bear
• Why nobody in Washington wants to say recession. - by Daniel Gross
• somehow a connection is made (Iraq and Election) - Spencer Ackerman
• Thoughts on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis - Dennis Lockhart - FRB Atlanta
• 'Clean' Coal? Don't Try to Shovel That - washingtonpost.com
• Why I am not a Rawlsian - Tyler Cowen
• Is a Lean Economy Turning Mean? - New York Times
• A great subprime paper from Sufi and Mian - Richard Green

Blogroll: Five Randomly Selected Blogs

• A Fistful of Euros
• Oligopoly Watch
• Chicago Boyz
• Seeing the Forest
• Odd Numbers - Zubin Jelveh

Blogroll: Recent Additions (add your economics blog)

• Modeled Behavior
• The Economic Populist
• Oxonomics

Comments

[hari]

Iraq: The Three Trillion Dollar War - Open Left

Mark has succeeded in tapping the internet to provide us a glimpse of what's coooking here with cost of war in Iraq.
My take is very simple - this WH didn't plan and/or anticipate the fiscal budget implications since no one was able to cost the invasion and its aftermath in other than minimum cost runs. It's frightening to belief their current explanations - based on past performance.

The war is a dismal failure of Congressional oversight and scrutiny, as well as military budetary/allocation system. Either they're completely dumb/stupid or it was a real oversight and they don't care!

What HRC/OB are struggling to clarify is their ability to make some dent into decisions already made by this WH. I've great inability to trust either of them being able to stand the challenge of McCain when it comes to national security...because the public seems to still have their reservations about Demos/National Security credentials.

[anne]

[Possibly you may wish to add Dahr Jamail's website to the list:

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/ .

Jamail went to Iraqi on his own and wrote independent dispatches for several years, returning this past year and editing a team that remains in Iraq. Always independent, and focused on Iraqis in a way other reporting just is not. The writing varies in quality, but there is much to be learned and I know of no comparable ground source.]

[anne]

What I find now is what I have been finding, that there is stunningly little interest in the findings on the costs of wars and occupations of Joseph Stiglitz. No discussion in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washingotn Post, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times. No discussion on significant economics websites, beyond Mark Thoma's website. No discussion by significant blogging economists.

Possibly I am just being unfair, possibly I am completely mistaken. Where Amy Gooman will highlight the work of Stiglitz over several days and allow for an hour discussion, where selected media in Britain and Australia highlighted the work, we appear largely uninterested.

[anne]

Where Joseph Stiglirz relates the economic languishing of America to the way in which spending on wars and occupations have been handled fiscally and by the Federal Reserve, the interest appears to reside in selected media in Britain and Australia far more than here. Possibly I am giving too much credit though even to British and Australian media. Are economists in Britain and Australia discussing the work of Stiglitz? I find no Internet evidence.

Where there are continual arguments about economic difficulties in America, relating $3 trillion wars and occupations to the difficulties appears of little consequence to economic analysts from my reading. We have found a way of spending trillions of dollars that for many economists appears to have nothing to do with economics, even as we are continually warned about the dangers of spending. Spending on war and occupation however must in some way be so different than spending on social needs that no connection shoul be drawn.

[robertdfeinman]

I don't know if energy policy can be considered economics in the traditional sense, but this new blog by a European commissioner might warrant tracking to see if it develops into anything useful.

I'm not aware of any blogs run by officials, other than those of politicians running for election or re-election, so this may be a sign that online discussions may have a role in future policy planning - let's hope so.

http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/piebalgs/

[hari]

@rdf-

Carl Bildt/FM of Sweden is blogging and last month 2.5 million visitors were recorded on his official/public blog. Of course, he blogs in Swedish. But you can respond in English - I do - because I've forgotten Swedish writing!

CB was former UN high command in Kosovo and has done a lot of such work for UN/EU. He's also a former head of the Conservative (Moderate) party of Sweden. The guy still looks/talks like he was in 1960s when he faught against Palme and lost. His youthful demeanor is disarming, to say the least. Today, he had a video blog of his press conference with FM of Afghanistan visiting Sweden. Imagine what Afghanistan/FM said about his country's security needs: their first priority is to train their own nationals and takeover the policing/defending of the nation! He didn't speak about NATO and the fight going on there with US/Pentagon.

[hari]

Sorry! Carl Bildt's blog

http://carlbildt.worldpress.com/

[hari]

You get a lot of inside info on what's up with Russia.
Stockholm has always been a window over Russia from way back in the Cold War. That's why I studied Russian also!

For Anne, I don't know if you can read Swedish or not. But CB is providing a lot of info/agenda from meetings with FMs inside/outside EU on minority problems and whatnots.

Russians are also participating (in Russian!) and that makes it fun. Because they can really tell stories and jokes...

[anne]

"For Anne, I don't know if you can read Swedish or not."

Though from an American perpective this is comical, I know there are several fascinating Swedish blogs and Sweden is advanced in all things Internet.

[hari]

@ Anne -

I don't understand you - why ..."comical"?

[anne]

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2921527420080302

February 2, 2008

Iraq War Hits US Economy: Nobel Winner
By Reuters

The Iraq war has contributed to the US economic slowdown and is impeding an economic recovery, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says.

[anne]

Extra, extra: We womens be proven dumb by a real almost womens in a real almost newspaper. Watch me be proud.

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/math_is_hard.php

March 2, 2008

Math is Hard!
By Matthew Yglesias

I'm having trouble believing this was actually published * -- it's a long argument by Charlotte Allen in The Washington Post in favor of the proposition that women are dumb. That's no exaggeration, that's what the piece is about. Plus: frenology:

"Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size)."

Presumably if we left Allen out of the sample, things might look different.

* http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992_pf.html

[anne]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992_pf.html

March 2, 2008

We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?
By Charlotte Allen - Washington Post

Here's Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: "He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female's cry of 'I love you, Obama!' with a reassuring 'I love you back.' " Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren't screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: "Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful." Huh?

"Women 'Falling for Obama,' " the story's headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

I'm not the only woman who's dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It's a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some feminists can't believe that there's this thing called "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or that Celine Dion actually sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox....

[evagrius]

"A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox...."

This is in distinction to the novel, "Office of Men", in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about sports.

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/the-economy-never-really-got-its-groove-back/

March 2, 2008

“The Economy Never Really Got Its Groove Back”
By Paul Krugman

Mark Zandi of economy.com, quoted * in this NYT piece on the weak job market, has a nice turn of phrase for what I’ve been trying to say on a number of occasions: even during the best years of the “Bush boom,” the job market never got remotely as good as it was in the late 1990s. The official unemployment rate has been a deceptive indicator; the employment-population ratio has been a much better guide to how the economy feels.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02jobs.html

[anne]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/04/employment-a-tale-of-two-administrations/

January 4, 2008

Employment: a Tale of Two Administrations
By Paul Krugman

For some perspective on the jobs picture, here's the employment-population ratio — the percentage of adults with jobs — since the beginning of the Clinton administration.

[Picture] *

I think the picture speaks for itself.

* Picturing Paul Krugman's picture:

The job creation number through the Presidency of Bill Clinton was actually 225,000 a month, with total job creation of 21.6 million. Taking the favored 52 months of the Bush Presidency, from August 2003 to December 2007, 8.3 million jobs have been created or 160,000 jobs created a month. ** That is almost 3.4 million fewer jobs created during the 52 most favored months of the Bush Presidency.

We created 2.7 million jobs a year from 1992 to 2000, but we were under 1.5 million in 2007. We were below 95,000 a month for the final quarter in 2007.

** http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/20071207.html

[anne]

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/03/washington-post.html

March 2, 2008

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch
By Brad DeLong

The Washington Post today gives space to Linda Hirshman to complain that women are stupid and fickle:

For Hillary's Campaign, It's Been a Class Struggle: * Female governors, lifelong feminists, union leaders, moms rising -- all rushing into the Obama camp. What's going on?... When faced with a "movement," resistance is costly. And for weeks now, online and on cable news channels, almost anyone who expresses criticism of Obama or support for Clinton has elicited a firestorm of disapproval. Obama's scores of defenders -- "Obamabots," they're called -- immediately recite the anti-Clinton litany.... Well-regarded activists such as Planned Parenthood's Feldt or successful writers such as Tina Fey who support Clinton are excoriated as worthless pieces of nonsense.... Has this rhetorical firestorm had an effect on the political decisions of college-educated white women?... [T]he movement quality of the Obama campaign has certainly raised expectations of commitment to its candidate well beyond those of a normal political campaign. This has to be generating powerful peer pressure. The commentary can feel like something close to intimidation, a gantlet of verbal punishment meted out to anyone who dares to disagree. It's well established social science that women on the whole are much more averse to political conflict... avoiding that gantlet may be one more reason women are tilting toward Obama.... Mark Penn has been criticized for everything from short-sightedness about the primary schedule to overspending on sandwich platters. But those failures pale beside the biggest one of all: not recognizing the fickleness of the female voter...

* http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902991_pf.html