I’ve been a reader of Mark Perry’s for years and years. I love his stuff. One of my favorite installments that he runs is the “Chance of Recession”. Here, he highlights data delivered by the New York Federal Reserve bank.
The bank does a neat analysis of some different values and comes up with the chance that the economy will be in recession in the next year. The data isn’t perfect, but the rough strokes are enlightening.
Let’s look.
Posted in Economy, Politics: National
Tagged Intrade, Mark Perry, New York Fed, Recession
Care to guess when the last time a Federal Budget has been passed?
Why won’t the Democrats propose a budget?
Could it be:
Posted in Economy, Elections 2012, Government
Tagged Barack Obama, Democrats, Federal Budget
Profit
Greed
Corporate
Crime
Money
Exploitation
All are failings of men. People, left to their own devices are unable to care for their neighbor. At least without profit or reward. And so it is that government must come to the rescue. It is government, and only government, that can take away the risks of life and grant peace and serenity.
There was a time, not so long ago, that people were free to choose. They could do a thing, and, based on that thing, expect a specific outcome.
This was as true in banking as it is in everything in life. There is no free lunch.
However, then came along lawmakers. Those people who think they can institute “fairness” and legislate morality.
These people felt they could pass laws that would limit banks and limit ill begotten profits all in the name of “the common man”.
Now we see the fruits of their labor.
Posted in Economics, Politics: National
Tagged Banks, Free Checking, Incentives, Regulation
The rush of technology and the din of the day can, at times, seem overwhelming. And a lot of the time, it seems that technology, the gadgets and the drive for more things, takes much of the blame. To be sure, there is much to be said that supports that.
E-mail is never ending.
Twitter is all encompassing.
Facebook can be a time sink that destroys entire days.
Blogging and on line news delivered to your shirt pocket? Don’t even get me started.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
HBO has the documentary “Too Big To Fail” playing right now. Ive watched it twice now and I have some thoughts.
First, the show is top notch. The acting is A grade and the quality of the production is excellent. This is a great movie.
I’m a big believer in incentives. People tend to look out for their own self interests. Always have, always will. And this isn’t bad – wolves and cows and sparrows and gophers do the same thing. But we NEED to acknowledge that fact.
“Too Big To Fail” does a remarkable job at showing the thinking going on at the time of the failures. But I get the feeling that the message is wrong. That the message is “Greed”.
There is certainly enough to go around. However, I think the message of intervention and policy is underscored. Not one time in the show is it mentioned WHY these institutions would make these loans. For sure, there is talk about Fan and Fred being nationalized….but there isn’t a whiff about the impact they had on the market thinking.
The movie is worth watching. However, understand, it’s got a Left leaning slant.
And does a good job making that case.
My wife recently recieved her iPad 2 in the mail. That means her old iPad goes to me. I’m trying to see if this thing can replace a laptop for blogging.
So far so good. The interface is intuitive and easy; even fun.
Now, lets see if I can insert an image.
Okay…..so that was easy’ish however, I get the feeling that I just published the post without wanting to be done.
Okay, now I’ gonna try and link a site:
Hmmmm….no joy.
It seems that I am posting in HTML mode and would need to be ble to “code” the hyperlink. Not an insurmountable problem but not as easy as it should be.
Now to try and try fonts.
Bold
Italic
Underline
Again, no joy.
If I wana include such fonts, I would have to code them as well. Not such a good feature.
Now, to be fair, this is the WordPress App. I think WordPress needs to do more work on this, not Apple. The other missing feature is it’s missing Apple’s real time spell check and auto-cap feature. Big dissatisfier. Oh, and the double tap period applicator. Boo.
I’ll next try to post from the native website and not the app. We’ll see if that’sany better. Or worse.
I often hammer the Left. And for good reason.
However, I don’t work hard enough to hammer the Right when they are wrong or praise the Left when they are right. [hee hee].
I wanna work on that, and so, to this end, I support the pro-choice legislation introduced by the 2 NY senators.
I’m sure I saw it somewhere – I certainly can’t claim to have coined this phrase on my own.
But I’ll define it:
Climate Rapture – A belief held by AGW alarmists that the amount of climate change caused by mankind will bring about the end of the world. Full and complete annihilation of Mother Earth is the only acceptable conclusion to the current trajectory of mankind.
Don’t mix.
Recently I posted about an Economics Literacy Test. The Minneapolis Federal Reserve conducted a survey and asked people to answer 13 economic questions. Those 404 people didn’t do so well.
While I took the test I wondered who would do well and who would do so well. It occurred to me that some people will do better just because they want the answer to be something other than what it is. For example, if asked, I suspect a vast majority of Liberals would say that the oil companies make too much profit. Indeed, the oil companies rank 114 out of 215 industries in profits. Hardly gouging, huh?
Then I was reminded of a post I blogged here about a year ago. It described who did well and who did poorly on questions of economics:
Best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8:
Very conservative, 1.30
Libertarian, 1.38
Conservative, 1.67
Moderate, 3.67
Liberal, 4.69
Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.
Not so good if you are Liberal.
Posted in Economics, Education, Politics: National
Tagged Conservative, Democrat, Liberal, Libertarian, Republican