Politics: Economics
drorzel | January 14, 2009A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason for the veiled threats we got the next year.
The Corporate Masters have just published an exclusive post-election interview with Marburger. I read it with some interest, mostly to see if it would change my impression of him.
I have to say, it didn't. Not only does he…
drorzel | December 6, 2008As always, if you want penetrating analysis of the news, you need to go to a comedian. Jon Stewart explains why Congress is willing to bail out Wall Street, but not Detroit:
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It's kind of sad that this is one of the best arguments I've heard for giving the car companies the money they want.
(As an aside, Comedy Central's embed code for their video player is just about the ugliest thing ever. It's four times the size of the YouTube…
drorzel | November 20, 2008I flagged this Matt Yglesias post about post-mortem examinations of the financial crisis as something to respond to. Matt writes:
I was at an interesting discussion with an ideologically diverse group of people last night of the future of financial regulations. One thing that there was broad agreement on that hadn't really snapped into focus for me previously is the idea that doing rigorously precise forensic work on how to understand "what went wrong" and then design the rule that would have prevented this is neither necessary nor sufficient to improving things going further.
The basic…