November 13, 2010 9:33 am November 13, 2010 9:33 am I’ve lately taken to reading another econoblog, TripleCrisis; it’s been especially good on the (especially bad) G20 summit. In particular, Gerald Epstein is right: A strange thing happened on the way to the G-20 meetings: world elite opinion has turned against the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” (QE) program, the only significant “Keynesi

Kevin O’Rourke has a post, What do markets want, raising the same issues I’ve been discussing about debt, austerity, etc. But never mind all that: read the comments, specifically this one: The markets want money for cocaine and prostitutes. I am deadly serious. Most people don’t realize that “the markets” are in reality 22-27 year old business school graduates, furiously concocting chaotic trading

October 27, 2010 10:46 am October 27, 2010 10:46 am In my first WEITW post, I went after the claim that quantitative easing, by weakening the dollar, could actually hurt recovery — because, you see, a weaker dollar leads to higher commodity prices. As I tried to explain, a weaker dollar is also a stronger euro (and other currencies), so what raises prices in terms of one currency lowers them in te

Mark Thoma points us to a paper by Mary Daly of the San Francisco Fed, which contains this remarkable chart of core inflation in two episodes:

By Dave Itzkoff October 11, 2010 1:50 pm October 11, 2010 1:50 pm How did “The Simpsons” manage to track down Banksy, the pseudonymous British artist, and get him to create the powerful opening-credit sequence from Sunday’s episode, which seems to reveal the torturous sweatshop responsible for the show’s creation? And how, after all that mockery, have the producers behind that Fox animated series