The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas

trailer of David Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Lisbeth Salander will be played by Rooney Mara who played the girlfriend who dumped Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network. Daniel Craig will play Blomkvist.

Hitchens's review of the book.

Profiles in Fed Cowardice by Krugman

Not really a surprise, but still shocking. The Fed predicts disastrously high unemployment as far as the eye can see (pdf):

Fed forecast of the unemployment rate 

And in response to this dire prospect, it declares its work done.

Notice that the Fed does not buy into the notion that there has been a large rise in the structural rate of unemployment, that 9 percent is the new normal. That stuff off to the right, labeled "longer run", is in effect the Fed’s estimate of how low unemployment could and should go without causing inflation problems. So the Fed agrees that something should be done to greatly increase demand.

But it washes its hands of the problem, even though Bernanke and his colleagues are well aware that nobody else will act.

I’m aware that there are doubts about how much the Fed could accomplish; I share those doubts. But that’s no reason not to try.

This display of passivity is awesome. And it’s shameful.

Krugman lecture on Keynes

How the Repo Market Ate Wall Street by Kevin Drum

PIMCO Founder To Deficit-Obsessed Congress: Get Back To Reality by Brian Beutler

Bill Gross is saying what Bernanke and other are arguing: stimulus now, mid-term deficit reduction later. Hopefully if the economy continues in the doldrums Bernanke will do QE3.

(via Krugman)


Maybe Gross is admitting he was wrong about rates shooting up once QE2 ends.

Dean Baker on Clinton

Dean Baker on Robert Samuelson

Greg Mankiw:

Democratic critics of the [Ryan] plan suggest that enacting it would be akin to pushing Grandma over a cliff. But they rarely point out that the premium-support model is in some ways similar to the system set up under President Obama’s health care law. If choosing among competing private plans on a government-regulated exchange is a good idea for someone at age 50, why is it so horrific for someone who is 70?

Obamacare was a political compromise. It's better than nothing and Medicare is better than Obamacare.*

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*My theory is that after winning in 2008, Obama's people decided Romney was their most likely opponent in 2012. After passing the ARRA, they went to work to pass Romneycare and drew out the process (town halls, lengthy committee debates) so that it would really sink in with the conservative base that they hate Romneycare and therefore Obama's strongest opponent in 2012 would be tainted by the association and have a more difficult time in the primaries. But man that Mankiw really is a hack, isn't he?

Joe Nocera on Glass-Steagall:

The first thing I realized is that all the horse-trading over the bill’s provision was done by Democrats. The Republicans, having been badly defeated in the 1932 election, had no ability to block it or even amend it. For instance, Republicans tended to view the creation of deposit insurance as "socialism." (Sound familiar?) But it didn’t matter: Steagall cared deeply about deposit insurance. Many community bankers -- as strong a force back then as today -- also supported the idea because they believed it would renew customers’ faith in the banks, and bring back deposits. (This turned out to be true.) Glass, though skeptical, went along so he could get things he cared about, mainly a stronger Federal Reserve with more power over the banks.

The second thing I realized was that, the Sisson speech notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little controversy over what we now think of as the law’s primary achievement: splitting commercial and investment banking. The fights were all over issues that seem inconsequential by today’s lights. It’s as if the notion of breaking the banking business into two was always a foregone conclusion.

David Brooks Discovers That It Was All Fannie Mae's Fault by Dean Baker

collection of macro readings by Krugman

Rule by Rentiers by Krugman

The Decline of PIMCO Macro by Krugman

I first talked to the Pimco people in, I think, 1991, when I was asked (and paid) to talk to them about economic issues; don’t remember the subject. It was a striking experience, sartorially: I showed up in Newport Beach in my gray business suit, and they were all in casual shirts and slacks, some (as I remember it) with fashionable stubble.

Since then, of course, Pimco has continued to be a huge success; Bill Gross is without doubt a great investor. I have often found the economic analyses coming out of Pimco deeply enlightening. And in 2009-2010 the firm won big by betting, correctly, on interest rates staying low.

For the past year or so, however, Pimco seems to me to have been making less and less sense. Gross bet big on the idea that rates would spike when quantitative easing ends; I guess he has three weeks to be vindicated, but it sure doesn’t look like it. And the economic logic was all wrong. Now Mohamed El-Erian is claiming that inflation in China and Brazil is Bernanke’s fault; again, the economic logic is all wrong.

What’s strange about this is that nobody was better at laying out the logic of deleveraging and its consequences than Pimco’s Paul McCulley. But maybe that’s the explanation: McCulley has moved on.

Anyway, El-Erian’s latest sort of shocked me; it sounds as if he’s making up his own version of macroeconomics. And that’s not something you should do unless the existing models have failed -- which they haven’t.

Krugman, Jared Bernstein, Kenneth Rogoff and David Walker on Charlie Rose

David Leonhardt on Germany's economic successes

Woody Allen's new movie Midnight in Paris is really good. It was easy for me to identify with Owen Wilson's character. Back in 1999 when I was 29 I went on a fund-raising cruise for The Nation magazine and had the chance to hang out with some of my favorite writers and editors at that time like Hitchens, Cockburn, Pollit, Navasky and Vanden Heuvel. It wasn't exactly like Midnight in Paris, but they were charming and friendly like Hemingway and Fitzgerald are to Wilson in the movie and I was blown away.

Krugman on Fatal Fatalism

Our current economic discourse is pervaded by fatalism. Leave aside the people who insist that somehow Obama has destroyed capitalist incentives by passing Mitt Romney’s health care plan and threatening to raise tax rates to Clinton-era levels. Even among people who should be sensible, you hear many assertions that run something like this: historically, recovery from financial crisis is usually slow, so we have to accept a slow recovery this time around too. Actually, that’s more or less what Obama has been saying.

Gavyn Davies* writes in the Financial Times about Robert Lucas and the classical view of the global recession.

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*Gavyn Davies is a macroeconomist who is now chairman of Fulcrum Asset Management and co-founder of Prisma Capital Partners. He was the head of the global economics department at Goldman Sachs from 1987-2001, and was chairman of the BBC from 2001-2004.
     He has also served as an economic policy adviser in No 10 Downing Street, an external adviser to the British Treasury, and as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

Ratko Mladic caught

Jared Bernstein has a blog.

Single-payer health care in Vermont

Needed: Plain Talk About the Dollar by Christina Romer