Archive for August 25th, 2009

How Do You Fill The Deficit Hole?

Something to keep you tossing and turning this evening or if you read it in the morning spoil your whole day. From EconomistMom: How about $14 trillion?  $9 trillion ($9.051 trillion) is the Obama Administration’s 10-year deficit projection based on their own economic forecast and their own estimate of the costs of their policy proposals (as proposed in […]

Defending The Bank Bailouts

Tyler Cowen asked today, “We’re the bailouts a good idea?” He then proceeds to answer his question in the affirmative. Here is his logic: If another big negative shock comes the government’s liability position still could turn out to be much worse.  But if we stop and click pause and evaluate the policy today — […]

Toyota Cutting Capacity

Here’s a textbook example of why the climb out of the recession is going to be long, hard and probably result in a bit of an altered environment. From Reuters: Toyota Motor Corp, the world’s biggest automaker, will cut its global production capacity by 10 percent, or 1 million vehicles, the Nikkei business daily reported. […]

Case-Shiller June Numbers

The June Case-Shiller numbers are out and as expected they indicate further firming of the housing market. Before I get to them let me first note the consumer confidence numbers. The NYT reports that consumer confidence as measured by the Conference Board was up to 54.1 in August from 47.4 in July. Economists had expected […]