Tax deductions: Your questions answered
George W Bush would never raise taxes, oh no. But according to a trial balloon being floated today in the New York Times and a few weeks ago in the LA Times, he might eliminate tax deductions,...
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232 Broome Street
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine. "You know everything, Felix," she said, perspicaciously. "Instead of buying a loft, would it be cheaper to buy a loft building and then convert it into...
View ArticleSweden and theWashington Consensus
Both Paul O’Mahoney and Stefan Geens link to a piece by Daniel Brook in Dissent magazine entitled "How Sweden Tweaked the Washington Consensus". It’s mainly interesting, I think, for confirming...
View ArticleFreakonomics
Last year, I said some nice things about Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, or at least about an article they wrote in the New York Times Magazine: The best piece of all in the magazine, however,...
View ArticleFinancial quacks
Whenever I rail against journalistic innumeracy, which is often, I tend to point out that journalists are normally creative arts-graduate types, who frequently have very little grasp of numbers. In...
View ArticleIs debt relief aid?
UK charity Action Aid has been getting quite a bit of press today with its report that only one-third of G7 overseas development assistance (ODA) is "real" aid. The rest, they say, is "phantom aid"....
View ArticleAll counterfeiting statistics are bullshit
At the end of May, the US Congress passed the Stop Counterfeiting in Manufactured Goods Act. Faced with a huge and growing problem, the Congress acted decisively: simple possession of counterfeit...
View ArticleStock and flow
I’ve already made it very clear what I think about credit cards: this post is an attempt to flesh out one theory of how and why they work the way they do – to the benefit of banks and the detriment of...
View ArticleRace and mortgages
Everybody knows that American blacks pay more for their groceries than American whites do. The same, it seems, is true of mortgages. (Update: I just, you know, actually read this first sentence. And...
View ArticleWho is Treasury under secretary for international affairs?
The job of under secretary for international affairs at the US Treasury is a hugely important job which few people have ever heard of. It’s a political position, which means the decision as to who gets...
View ArticleKrugman, Lewis and greed: an exchange
Although the entries on this website don’t get nearly as many comments as those of other bloggers, I do occasionally get an intelligent note in response to something I write. Such was the case...
View ArticleEliot Spitzer vs Sandy Weill
New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, stood up in front of a Wall Street crowd last week to give a 20-minute speech. He started with a joke: he was glad he’d been invited, because he really...
View ArticleWhy Bush should ignore the stock market
To keep my mind sharp, I like to spend a certain amount of time reading bloggers with whom I disagree, such as the estimable 2 Blowhards and the slightly less estimable Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan’s not...
View ArticleCredit counselling services
The New York Times fronts a story today on not-for-profit credit-counselling services. Here’s the nut graf, which comes very high up for a NYT piece: The investigation could jeopardize the agencies’...
View ArticleGlobalisation’s commandments
Lance Knobel lists today Martin Wolf’s "ten commandments of globalisation," saying that "they make great good sense." I disagree: 1. The market economy is the only arrangement capable of generating...
View ArticleHousing bubbles
Is the New York (indeed, the US) housing bubble going to burst? A look at the situation in the UK would suggest that it isn’t. Interest rates have already started rising there – but a new report says...
View ArticlePostrel, highways and jobs
One of the great things about blogs written by professional journalists is that they often contain a lot more information than gets printed. Newspaper columns, by their very nature, have to be a...
View ArticlePostrel responds
Virginia Postrel has responded to my post of last week, on the subject of her take on federal highway spending. Basically, she doesn’t believe the numbers being bandied around Washington on the subject...
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Corporate profits
I got an email this morning pointing me to an entry at the Washington Monthly weblog, which essentially excerpted a longer post by Brad Delong. The heart of the argument is a graph, showing how...
View ArticleGoogle IPO questions
I’m a financial journalist, but I’ve never pretended to understand the stock market. Bonds, yes; stocks, no. A recent Reuters story, for instance, includes this bizarre segue: “In a deal like that...
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