Can Obama cut the deficit and have job growth too?

Stephanie Kelton demonstrates that as long as unemployment remains high, the deficit will remain high. Here’s the formula: Spending creates income. Income creates sales. Sales create jobs. If you think you can cut the deficit without destroying jobs, dream on. She argues that instead of dreaming about ways to pull off the impossible, it’s time get to work on a plan to increase employment

Voodoo People

It just isn’t going to work, and it’s very interesting that the man who invested this type of what I call a voodoo economic policy -George H.W. Bush, Carnegie Mellon University, 10 April 1980, in reference to Ronald Reagan’s economic policy Luke Johnson, the head of Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm in the

BELLS in Hell that Don’t Go Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling

The BELLS are a group of four countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) who in their wisdom decided to adopt and then stick “come hell or high water” to a currency peg with to Euro. Thus was opened one of the more interesting and lively chapters in modern macroeconomic debate

Here’s why Jim Rogers is bullish on Asia

Jim Rogers is bullish on Asia. In a twenty-minute interview with the BBC, he explains why? Hat tip Paul Kedrosky. Like Paul, “I find many of his rhetorical tricks maddening” but it is an informative interview nonetheless. Videos below

How Political Bias Alters Economic Understanding

If the facts go against us, we just dismiss them by selective editing or simply making stuff up to support our original thinking. When it comes to politics, when it comes to economics, the facts don’t really matter. Human reasoning is not designed to pursue truth but to argue a point. It’s mainly about philosophical predisposition

Consistency

Once politicians set policy and commit to it by signing it into existence, they would rather risk losing office than change course

Why markets fail

George Soros makes the case for economics as a social science using his theory of reflexivity. Here are some additional thoughts to help understand why markets fail

Do The Facts Really Matter?

Partisans have a well-developed political world view. Facts don’t change that view. How does one deal with that? If you’re wrong, you will be confronted with a decision on how to react. The insidious thing about this is that when we are wrong, we react automatically in defense without even thinking about it. And that’s where we get into trouble. Being wrong is humbling, humiliating, shaming – and shame is an emotion that is about as powerful as fear in driving motivations. But being wrong can be a good thing. I will leave you with a TED video by Kathryn Schulz on being wrong. I think it gets at what I’m trying to say

Case-Shiller Housing Data Confirm Move Below Post-Bubble Trough

The house price data has been dismal in the last several months. With the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Indices released today, we have now passed below the post-bubble trough and are hitting new low prices across the country. For data through January 2011, the broad Composite-20 index is down 3.1% compared to January 2010. The

Human Complexity and the Strategic Games of Uncertainty

In a recent post I discuss the limitations of neoclassical economics and the strain of behavioral economics that remains tethered to it. I argue that they fail because the market is inhabited by people, heterogeneous and context-sensitive, who do not live up to the lofty assumptions of mathematical optimization and Aristotelian logic that underlie these approaches – and do not do so for good reasons.

The nature of complexity also is different in the economic realm from that in physical systems because it can stem from people gaming, from changing the rules and assumptions of the system. Ironically, “game theory” is not suited to addressing this source of complexity. But military theory is

I don’t write about some topics for a reason

This is just a reminder that, while I write about a broad array of topics here (the economy, monetary policy, investing, banks, Europe, technology, etc., etc.), there are some topics about which I don’t know enough information to take an informed stance. I have views on these issues, but my expertise is limited enough –

Canada and Oil: More Complicated than One Might Suspect

We have found that the correlation between oil and the Canadian dollar has collapsed. We conduct the correlation analysis on a 60-day rolling basis, using percent change. The correlation peaked at the end of last year near 0.76. It now stands at -0.1 (see graph from Bloomberg below This is the first time the correlation is inverse since the July-Oct 2007 period. In the 1992-2002 period, the correlation was often inverse, but in recent years this is an exception