Lynne Kiesling I am unlikely to say anything more here about our current financial situation, its causes, and the policy responses to it. I’ll give the likely-final word to Nick Gillespie at Reason: “For 30 years,” begins a New York Times story titled “Both Sides of the Aisle See More Regulation,” “the nation’s political system …
Lynne Kiesling This is the closest I’m gonna get to discussing politics at KP … Glassbooth is a pretty cool web application through which you take a budget of points, allocate them among a set of policy issues to rank which issues are most important to you, and then state your policy positions on questions …
Michael Giberson The U.S. Conference of Mayors trumpets a study predicting a boom in green jobs. (A green job, for this study, is a job “devoted to the reduction of fossil fuels, the increase of energy efficiency, and the curtailment of greenhouse gas emissions.”) According to a groundbreaking study establishing a national Green Jobs Index, …
Why a Big Increase in “Green Jobs” Might Be a Bad Sign Read More »
Michael Giberson Great news! I was reading through some bailout, uh, rescue commentary this morning, and found this political advice from Joel Stein at the L.A. Times: If I were in Congress, I’d hold out. Every representative who voted no on the bailout got something totally sweet in the bill that passed the Senate. Jim …
Lynne Kiesling Fast recapitalization, removing the signaling penalty by having the government require banks to stop giving dividends in the short run … those are the kind of policies that economists have been discussing, fleshing out, and encouraging over the past two weeks. Of course, the challenge to those proposals is that the parties who …
An Alternative Approach to the Bailout: Enable Fast Recapitalization Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Before I read the Senate version of the revised bailout plan, I generally agreed with Tyler Cowen: “The modified Paulson plan was better than nothing — especially after the market had been scared — but far from my first choice.” I also generally agree with his conclusions (1) on the importance of transparency …
Revised Bailout Plan: Ok, Now I’m Not Just Skeptical, I’m Angry and Disgusted Read More »
Michael Giberson Writing with a calmness and patience not typically seen when economists write about price gouging, here is Geoff Styles, at Energy Outlook, Gas Lines and Bank Runs: …[W]ith a significant shortfall in deliveries along these pipelines, and US gasoline inventories that were already extremely low going into the storms, local prices should have …
Michael Giberson Yes, Texas has a price gouging law, and yes the Attorney General recently has issued a press release warning against price gouging – actually multiple press releases (Sept 16, Sept 19, Sept 24; a second press release of Sept 16 noted that state hotel tax collections were suspended for persons displaced by Hurricane …
Michael Giberson Robert Rapier at R-Squared Energy Blog noticed the EIA showing gasoline inventories at their lowest levels since 1967, and because consumption rates are higher now than in 1967, he pointed out that “days of supply” in inventory is probably at its lowest level ever. Rapier comments: Someone asked during a panel discussion at …
Supply Problem + Price Gouging Law = Rationing Gas by Running out Read More »
Michael Giberson Joseph Romm, writing at Grist, notes that a recent Economist story on hydrogen-fueled cars comes to the same conclusion he had reached when he wrote about the Honda Clarity prototype for a Technology Review blog. To wit, there is no hydrogen-powered car in your future. The Economist notes that hydrogen cars do have …
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