The Unbroken Window

Brad DeLong calls anyone who questions the fiscal stimulus on any grounds to be a partisan, unethical, Republican hack. Then I read this.

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Stronger opposition came from Democrats, who dismissed the $3,000 credit to employers for every job created or saved as ripe for abuse and difficult to administer. Oh, but an $800 billion stimulus package and a $3 trillion budget of funds that are not yours to begin with are immune to such issues.  Read more here. [...]

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The Treasury once estimated that roughly nine notes out of every million are counterfeits. Let’s put that in perspective. There is roughly $1 trillion in US currency floating around out there. This would seem to indicate that about $9 million worth of the notes in circulation are in fact fraudulent. Let’s see about “official” counterfeiting [...]

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… that their oxygen is not flavorful enough.

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Aggregate value of checkable deposits at the start of the financial crisis (August 2007): $605 billion Aggregate value of checkable deposits one year later (August 2008): $612 billion Aggregate value of checkable deposits two weeks ago (December 29, 2008): $781 billion You can look at the data on monetary aggregates here.

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Sea ice ends year at same level as 1979. Quick! Everyone start driving that Hummer …

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I am preparing lecture notes for my Money and Banking class and wanted to track how the M1 Money Multiplier has changed over time. And I saw this: You will notice two things. First that the multiplier has fallen steadily since 1984 from nearly 3 to around 1.5. I’ll go into much more detail in [...]

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We’ve been doing it for years: And while everyone’s fretting over the bailout package for the auto industry, most taxpayers would be shocked to learn that they’re also footing the bill for some of these highly profitable bowl games. From 2001 to 2005, seven tax-exempt bowls received $21.6 million in government aid. The Sugar Bowl, [...]

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An increase in mortgage delinquencies due to a nationwide decline in housing prices was the trigger for a full-blown liquidity crisis that emerged in 2007 and might well drag on over the next few years. While each crisis has its own specificities, the current one has been surprisingly close to a -classical banking crisis. What [...]

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