By Jessica Hagy over at Indexed.
This makes a nice lead in for a realization I’ve had about the sub-prime fiasco and the housing markets, adding to what The New Yorker had to say in Home Economics back in March.
A few years ago a lot of economists and financial experts, including Alan Greenspan were warning [...]
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A Brave Army of Heretics -economicprincipals.com
For the last 125 years, however, ever since the views of Leon Walras and other theorists of general equilibrium became encoded in a famous textbook of Alfred Marshall (or, rather, partially encoded), technical economists have viewed the economy as a system in which individuals deal with one another only [...]
As fuel prices soar, rustlers pilfer barrels of used cooking oil to make biodiesel - IHT
A few years ago, drums of used french fry grease were only of interest to a small network of underground biofuel brewers, who would use the slimy oil to power their souped-up antique Mercedes.
Now, restaurants from Berkeley, California, to Sedgwick, [...]
You Can’t Afford To Go To The Movies. Thanks, Ethanol!
Ethanol, the stupid fuel that the government loves for some reason, is going to take up 40% of next year’s corn crop. Movie theaters make nearly half of their money from concessions, and a third of that money comes from popcorn sales. When concession prices [...]
Whenever people ask me about investing in China, which they do a lot, I ask them would they be so willing to invest in a bunch of U.S. companies they know absolutely nothing about? Then why are they so willing to invest in companies they really know nothing, in most cases majority owned by [...]
Wikipedia defines economic elasticity as follows:
In economics, elasticity is the ratio of the proportionate change in one variable with respect to proportional change in another variable, such as the responsiveness of the price of a commodity to changes in market demand or visa-versa. In terms of elasticity, a market or good can be described as [...]
The computer model that once explained the British economy
A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor.
Speaking of early computers I just happened [...]
Paulson says credit crisis may be fading
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Wednesday the worst of the credit crisis may have passed but acknowledged that rising gas prices will blunt the effect of 130 million economic stimulus checks. He ruled out a second stimulus package for now.
Mortgage Delinquencies and Foreclosures
Conclusion The realtor’s mantra is "location, location, location," and, as I have discussed this evening, local variation in housing and mortgage markets is considerable. This variation is useful for understanding the sources of the increase in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, and it should be taken into account [...]
Found at FreakingNews.com
Money Celebrities pictures
The more George Soros talks, the less people care what he thinks.
The Great Depression Debate
Bernanke and many other economists believe the Fed’s failure to bail out stricken banks between 1929 and 1932 was one of the main reasons the Depression lasted so long. In 1932, Herbert Hoover established the Reconstruction Finance Corp., which lent to banks, railroads, and other troubled businesses but failed to reverse the [...]
In NYT article Hard Times, but Your Lips Look Great Leonard Lauder, chairman of Estee Lauder Companies, suggests that lipstick sales are a gauge of the economy with sales increasing as times get worse.
Not only is the lipstick theory plausible, “it’s perfectly consistent with all kinds of economic theory,” said Richard DeKaser, the chief economist [...]
Econ-o-rama: Salary comparisons
Seeing a comparison between men and women’s salaries somewhere on the Interweb this morning it occurred to me to wonder how such comparisons are made, whether or not outliers are included. Typically, in my experience, people tend to use statistics that best seem to prove their point. So if you want to show a wide [...]