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Recent Articles
- Wrong Turn on Housing - March 1, 2009
- Housing's distress is too much supply chasing too little demand. Huge inventories of unsold homes have depressed prices and construction. Given that prices rose too...
- Obama's Stimulus: A Colossal Waste? - February 22, 2009
- His politics compromise the program's economics. Look at the numbers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that about $200 billion will be spent in 2011...
- A Lost Decade Ahead? - February 15, 2009
- What happened to Japan in the 1990s? It did not, as some commentators say, suffer a "depression." Not even a "great recession," as others put it. Japan...
- The Bailout Isn't a Morality Play - February 8, 2009
- Here's how the vicious circle works. With the economy weakening, more loans go into default. Distressed households and businesses can't meet payments. Diane Vazza...
- Too Little Bang for The Bucks - February 1, 2009
- "The smart grid, while a great idea, is basically a software project," says economist Marc Levinson of J.P. Morgan. "The reason utilities aren't pushing it faster...
- Three Economic Crises In One - January 25, 2009
- Second: the financial crisis. Lower lending deprives the economy of the credit to finance businesses, homes and costly consumer purchases (cars, appliances). The...
- The Great Foreboding - January 18, 2009
- Precisely this specter explains why the word "depression" is now so routinely deployed, even though we're a long way from the bread lines of the 1930s. But the...
- Boomers vs. the Rest - January 17, 2009
- The plight of the U.S. auto industry provides an ominous warning. For years, the "Big Three" and the United Auto Workers constructed an ever-more generous system of...
- Obama's Health Care Headache - January 11, 2009
- For the extra money, we receive no indisputably large benefit in national well-being. On some health measures (breast cancer survival rates), we do better than many...
- Obama's Unhealthy Choices - Newsweek - January 10, 2009
- Barack Obama talked somberly last week about getting the federal budget under control once the present economic crisis is past. By simple arithmetic, that...
- Stimulus = Stopgap - January 4, 2009
- The stimulus qualifies as a necessary evil, a parachute against an economic free fall. Conventionally, the economy is sliced into four sectors: consumer spending;...
- 2008: We Learned What We Don't Know - December 28, 2008
- It was once believed that the crisis of "subprime" mortgages -- loans to weaker borrowers -- would be limited, because these loans represent only 12 percent of all home...
- In the Hands of the Central Bankers - December 21, 2008
- Superficially, central bankers seemed poised to deliver a revival. As if on cue, major central banks cut interest rates in November and December to spur growth and...
- Lessons From the Great Inflation - Reason - December 17, 2008
- An Obama Gift for K Street - December 14, 2008
- There's more to come. Obama envisions refashioning a third of the economy: the health care sector, representing about 16 percent of gross domestic product; the...
- Bernanke's Daring Experiment - December 7, 2008
- All told, the Fed's new loans and credits easily exceed $1 trillion, which dwarfs the $335 billion committed by the Treasury Department under the better-known...
- Far-Reaching Reforms Can Wait - November 30, 2008
- The hallmark of this economic crisis has been its capacity to surprise: the desperate plight of the Big Three U.S. automakers is the latest reminder. We can expect...
- First Things First, Mr. President - Newsweek - November 29, 2008
- The Reverse Wealth Effect - November 24, 2008
- This last occurred in 1979 and 1980, when inflation reached 13 percent and government seemed incapable of suppressing it. No one knew what might happen. By 1980,...
- How to Bail Out General Motors - November 16, 2008
- No one knows what further havoc a GM bankruptcy might inflict. The Center for Automotive Research (CAR) estimates an initial job loss of 2.5 million. The logic: If...
- The Specter of Deflation - November 9, 2008
- It's this history that makes deflation terrifying. Obama and his fellow leaders should worry. Since mid-September, economic conditions have deteriorated badly. In...
- Obama's Economic Challenge - November 5, 2008
- Could the economy now be at a historic inflection point when it changes fundamentally? That's the central question confronting Obama. Only the most hardened among us...
- As the Rich Get Poorer - November 4, 2008
- Unfortunately, the mine has less gold. All the financial turmoil has left the wealthy -- however defined -- much less wealthy. Stock ownership is highly...
- The Attack on American Affluence - Newsweek - November 1, 2008
- Desperately Seeking Stimulus - October 28, 2008
- But if Congress and the White House do proceed, they should rise above self-indulgence. The great danger is that a new stimulus will become an excuse for politically...
- Young Voters -- Get Mad - October 22, 2008
- Guess what. You're not hearing much of this in the campaign. One reason, frankly, is that you don't seem to care. Obama's your favorite candidate (by a 64 percent...
- Good Times Breed Bad Times - October 19, 2008
- We Americans want instant solutions to problems. We crave a world of crisp moral certitudes, when the real world is awash with murky ambiguities. So it is now....
- The Engine of Mayhem - October 12, 2008
- Alone, American subprime mortgages should not have triggered a global crisis. Losses are smaller than they seem. Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com estimates that...
- Is This a Replay of 1929? - October 5, 2008
- We need to remind ourselves that economic slumps -- though wrenching and disillusioning for millions -- rarely become national tragedies. Since the late 1940s, the...
- The Bankruptcy of Modern Economics - Newsweek - September 28, 2008
- Bankrupt Economics - September 28, 2008
- The word that best epitomizes mainstream "macroeconomics" (the study of the entire economy, not individual markets) is demand. If weak demand left the economy in a...
- Paulson's Panic - September 23, 2008
- Contrary to much commentary, Paulson's plan would not be the largest government intervention in the private economy since World War II. That distinction still belongs to...
- The Great Confidence Game - September 21, 2008
- As is well-known, the crisis began with losses in the $1.3 trillion market for "subprime" mortgages, many of which were "securitized" -- bundled into bonds and sold to...
- Wall Street's Unraveling - September 16, 2008
- First, financial firms have moved beyond their traditional roles as advisers and intermediaries. Once, major investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman worked...
- Getting Real About Health Care - September 9, 2008
- The central health care problem is not improving coverage. It's controlling costs. In 1960, health care accounted for $1 of every $20 spent in the U.S. economy; now...
- The Real Economic Report Card - September 2, 2008
- Superficially, the conventional wisdom seems convincing. Census found that median household income in 2007 was $50,233. Though up 1.3 percent from 2006, that was...
- The Rise of Fantasy Politics - August 26, 2008
- Last week, I viewed "I.O.U.S.A.," an 87-minute documentary exploring the grim budget outlook. It is unbalanced budgets that, in many ways, define the political...
- The Real China Threat - August 19, 2008
- The real threat from China lies elsewhere. It is that China will destabilize the world economy. It will distort trade, foster huge financial imbalances and trigger a...
- The Great Energy Confusion - August 12, 2008
- In 2006, coal, oil and natural gas provided 85 percent of U.S. energy. In 2025, regardless of what we do, they will almost certainly remain the leading energy sources....
- A Tyranny of True Believers - August 5, 2008
- The latest manifestation of this is what Bill Bishop calls "the Big Sort." By that, he means that Americans have increasingly "clustered in communities of sameness,...