John McCain

I have never understood why people love, or even tolerate, John McCain.  That's not to say that Trump's thuggish attacks are justified.  But on the merits, why think John McCain is good at anything?

I have a suspicion that a group of Dem "dirty tricks" folks posed as Repubs, and tried to get McCain the nomination as a joke. And they are still laughing that it worked.

There is really no other plausible explanation. You can just hear the meeting, after lots of beers:

"Okay, seriously, what idiot can we try to get them to nominate?"

"Jeb Bush?" "No, Bush name is toxic now in 2007. No way they'll go for it."

"I've got it! No, really, I'VE GOT IT! John.....McCain!" (Everybody in room breaks up laughing). "No....the Repubs are stupid, but they aren't THAT stupid."

"Seriously, it's genius. He calls himself a 'war hero,' and nobody in that country club bunch would have the balls to challenge him on his actual policy views. And all the other candidates will split the vote of the conservative voters. It's perfect."

(And so they agreed, and McCain was the nominee). I bet it happened just that way.

Full Contact Skydiving

It doesn't look that fun to me.  I wouldn't enjoy either the skydiving or the MMA parts.  Combining them would not be an improvement.  (Nod to Radley Balko, @radleybalko )

Disturbing. But I Can't Stop Watching

Actual video documentation of Angus teaching the section of his
macro course on Keynes.  Insightful!

boo, poo boo, boo, poo boo, boo, poo boo, BOOOOO!

Nod to M. Kaan.

David Stockman wants to pee in your cornflakes

Wow. David Stockman confuses cause and effect, goes all gold-buggy, slanders Milton Friedman, and just generally comes unhinged in a massive hissy fit in today's NYT.

Let's break down a little bit of it, shall we?


Since the S&P 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually.

 This is a great analysis except that the timing is wrong and the causation is wrong. Here's the Fed's balance sheet since 1990:


 

As you can see, there's nothing special about 2000. There's a tiny blip, but the balance sheet stays on its path from 1900 to 2008, when it explodes.

And of course, that is/was the Fed's RESPONSE to the great recession. The terrible numbers Stockman gives for GDP growth and job growth are a direct result of the great recession. Real GDP grew strongly from 2000 to 2007, then collapsed.

A continually expanding Fed balance sheet didn't produce consistently bad economic numbers; the great recession happened and the Fed responded.

Sure, the Fed responded in an unconventional way, with asset purchases, because its policy rate was already pegged at zero. And sure, the unemployment rate hasn't fallen rapidly in response to quantitative easing. But the Fed has a dual mandate of stable prices and maximum employment, and their attempts to raise economic activity have not in the almost 4 years of unconventional policy aggravated inflation.

Here's that chart:

You can see how the Fed's unconventional policy responses have been geared to fears of deflation. Both the initial burst of asset purchases and the second rise came in response to falling inflation rates that threatened to go or stay negative.

This is probably the least shared view in America, given the Fed's many critics on both the Left and the Right, but Bernanke has actually done a very good job during this crisis and slow recovery.

Now let's consider Stockman's weird attack on Friedman:

This explosion of borrowing was the stepchild of the floating-money contraption deposited in the Nixon White House by Milton Friedman, the supposed hero of free-market economics who in fact sowed the seed for a never-ending expansion of the money supply. The Fed, which celebrates its centenary this year, fueled a roaring inflation in goods and commodities during the 1970s that was brought under control only by the iron resolve of Paul A. Volcker, its chairman from 1979 to 1987. Under his successor, the lapsed hero Alan Greenspan, the Fed dropped Friedman’s penurious rules for monetary expansion, keeping interest rates too low for too long and flooding Wall Street with freshly minted cash.

So Arthur Burns was a Friedmanite? So Paul Volcker who conquered inflation with his "iron resolve" didn't use a policy of targeting monetary aggregates a la Friedman? So the "Friedman Rule" which states that the price level should fall at the rate of time preference is fuel for the fire of "roaring inflation"?

Is Stockman trying to get a date with Naomi Klein?

I'll leave deconstructing the rest of this dreck as an exercise to the reader.

It's really been a banner week for wingnuts.

Happy Easter!