It is with great sadness that I report that Sir Clive Granger passed away last night. He had been a wonderful colleague and good friend.
Category Archives: here and there
Links for 2009-04-28
Washington University Professor James Morley on typical recession shapes and why they suggest we might see a strong recovery.
Harvard Professor Lucian Bebchuk on how to buy troubled assets while avoiding some of the problems pointed out by many analysts.
Oil 101 looks like a useful new book by commodity trader Morgan Downey.
And the Shadow Open Market Committee is back in business.
Some useful resources
Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi (paper here) document the usefulness of Google Trends and Google Insights for Search for purposes of updating assessments of current economic magnitudes. I see that Mark Thoma also calls attention to this intriguing data source.
Scott Irwin has collected an archive with some of the difficult-to-find classics in commodity research.
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge Winner
Congratulations to King Steve, the winner of the
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge, and to phuphighter, who came in a close second.
2009 NCAA Bracket: Round 1
Congratulations to J. Graham, who successfully predicted 7 of the 10 NCAA round 1 upsets to lead the
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge and come in ahead of 99.9% of the global ESPN entries. The future for Graham 1 does not look so bright, however, since Wakeforest’s first-round loss blew a pretty big hole in the rest of that nice bracket.
2009 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge
OK, I said I wouldn’t give you any hints, but decided to pass one along anyway. Here are President Obama’s picks.
It’s tournament time!
I know, you’ve been regretting all year that you didn’t get a chance to enter the the 2008 NCAA Bracket Econbrowser Challenge. Well guess what? Here it is March of 2009 and you have a brand new chance!
Point of Clarification: The Economic Report of the President, 2009
Misinformation in the talk-show world. From today’s Rush Limbaugh show (which is titled “A Teachable Moment on Tax Hikes”):
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to point out something to you about your comments on taxing, and Obama’s own economic advisors agree with you, and it’s in a report that I found online. It’s the Economic Report of the President. It’s issued by the Council of Economic Advisors, which were appointed by Obama, and there’s an entire section in that report that says lowering tax rates stimulates economic growth.
RUSH: That was then. They have removed that from the website. What’s the woman’s name that wrote that? I’m having a mental block. Romer. Christina Romer. She wrote that. She put it on their website and once Obama won: Bam! It came off, and now in its place is: “Spending a dollar generates a dollar and a half.” It used to be, “Reducing taxes every dollar generates a dollar and a half,” or a half a dollar. They’ve totally reworked it. She’s been neutered, as it were.
Worth reading
Links to a few items I found interesting on non-residential structure investment, the “bad bank” proposal, and separation of powers.
Links for 12-24-08
Today I outsource to a couple of links I found interesting:
Dave Cohen on oil prices.
Stephen Gordon on economists’ fatal flaw.
James Morley on the need for a new Fed-Treasury accord.