Stable Genius Liberal

The Recovery The Fed Wants

the FOMC meekly “anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually toward levels that the Committee judges to be consistent with its dual mandate.” If the unemployment rate is not currently at a level consistent with the mandate and is also not converging rapidly toward a level consistent with the mandate, then in my view the FOMC ought to do something new and dramatic in order to fulfill its mandate. Instead, the FOMC is standing pat. They think 9.1 percent unemployment and moderate growth is fine and they don’t intend to do anything about it.

Quinnipiac Poll: Obama Shows Marked Improvement

“President Barack Obama seems to be improving in voters’ eyes almost across-the-board,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in a release. “He scores big gains among the groups with whom he has had the most problems – whites and men. Women also shift from a five-point negative to a four-point positive.”

Good news, I think.

Glenn Beck’s Favorite Gold Company Charged With Fraud

No surprises here. Some of us were pointing out the odd business model in 2008. Their discussion of inflation and gold was so ridiculous that it stood out as ridiculous on Beck’s show.

Bloomberg’s Awful Comment; What Can We Say For Certain Regarding the GSEs?

we should mention that the conservative think tanks spent the 2000s saying the exact opposite of what they are saying now, and the opposite of what Bloomberg said above. They argued that the CRA and the GSEs were getting in the way of getting risky subprime mortgages to risky subprime borrowers. My personal favorite is Cato’s Should CRA Stand for “Community Redundancy Act?”, (2000, here’s a writeup by James Kwak), arguing a position amplified in Cato’s 2003 Handbook for Congress Financial Deregulation Chapter: “by increasing the costs to banks of doing business in distressed communities, the CRA makes banks likely to deny credit to marginal borrowers that would qualify for credit if costs were not so high.”

Amazing. Yet this lie about the CRA causing the sub-prime crisis persists.

The ECB’s Battle against Central Banking

The ECB continues to believe that financial stability is not part of its core business. As its outgoing president, Jean-Claude Trichet, put it, the ECB has “only one needle on [its] compass, and that is inflation.”

We’re just the Central Bank…why do they expect us to act like a Central Bank?

Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

So are the other skeptics going to review his work now?

Bin Laden Capture Earns Leon Panetta A $10,000 Bottle Of Wine

If you are making bets involving century old bordeaux, you are in the 1%

Nation Finally Breaks Down And Begs Its Smart People To Just Fix Everything | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Sad but true.

Rawls on Wall Street

to move forward and make a difference, Occupy Wall Street needs specific goals backed by a more coherent, more inspiring vision for American democracy. To their credit, protestors have recently begun debating which specific demands the movement should make, but their conversations appear to be unguided by any deeper wisdom. A perfect intellectual touchstone would… Continue reading Rawls on Wall Street

Republicans Cry Uncle On Spending … When Cuts Hit Home

They are for the common sense spending that helps them, not the evil socialist spending that helps other people.