Clive Crook

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post launches an angry attack on Paul Krugman's recent column on Social Security, which accused Barack Obama of being played for a sucker on the issue. The argument has two equally dishonest components. The first is to deny that Social Security faces a daunting financing problem -- one that will be much easier to fix (and less onerous for the low-income retirees that the head-in-the-sanders purport to care about) sooner rather than… More »

The rules of US monetary policy have changed: the Fed has revised its reporting procedures in a potentially significant way. The first set of the more detailed minutes of FOMC meetings that Ben Bernanke promised last week was published on Tuesday, covering the meeting that took place on October 30-31. I'm still unsure whether it is correct to regard the new regime as de facto inflation-targeting, as many Fed-watchers are suggesting. The case for this… More »

I've just ordered my Kindle, and felt the world would wish to know. (Early-onset blogo-narcissism, clearly.) A strange name, don't you think? Burning books, as widely noted, does spring irresistibly to mind. And a peculiar-looking object too. I'm wishing the Apple design team had given it a once-over, as soon as they had stopped laughing. But the functionality is the draw, especially for one who, for the first time in his life, has finally run out of bookshelves… More »

An interesting debate involving my FT colleague Willem Buiter, who thinks that a falling dollar could become very bad news for the US economy, and Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong, who are much more relaxed. Since all three know their international macro, I speculate that the difference turns not on economic insight but on a European as against an American perception of the issue. A currency depreciation as big as the one the dollar has already experienced--to say… More »

Other things equal, I am a tax-cutter not a tax-increaser. The leftist instinct to regard a tax increase on the rich as a good thing in itself--that is, to see a tax increase on the rich as a good thing even if the revenues were spent uselessly--repels me. Having declared that prejudice, I find nothing to disagree with in this new appraisal of the Bush tax cuts by the (left-leaning) Center on Budget Policy and Priorities.Since 2001, the Administration and Congress… More »

Barry Eichengreen has a post on Voxeu about how difficult it would be for a country to make an orderly exit from the euro. (The column draws on a longer NBER working paper.) The strength of the euro is squeezing Europe, and especially Italy, very hard. There is some talk of pulling out of the euro system. If only. Italy would surely benefit if it could. But, as Eichengreen explains, it literally cannot without precipitating a really fearsome financial crisis.In… More »

In my new column for the Financial Times, I try to restate the case for reforming Social Security:Barack Obama has upset a lot of Democrats by bringing social security back into presidential politics. Paul Krugman of The New York Times is leading the charge. In Mr Krugman’s view, following the administration’s clumsy and aborted effort to reform the system – Democrats would say destroy it – leaving well alone makes best political sense. Mr Obama, sounding… More »

She did well in Thursday night's debate, winning by a mile I'd say, partly because it was evidently a pro-Clinton crowd. Her bad performance in Philadelphia is, for the moment anyway, expunged. Her best (if not new) one-liner was to say, in reply to a question about her campaign's playing of the gender card, that she was being attacked not because she was a woman but because she was ahead. Good stuff, and it drew cheers. (The biggest of the night, I think, except… More »

An excellent briefing on where things stand from John Williams of the San Francisco Fed. (Thanks, once again, to Mark Thoma at Economist's View.)* The housing slump has deepened further. Sales of existing homes fell 8 percent in September and are down 19 percent over the past 12 months. New-home sales rebounded in September, but are still down 23 percent over the past year. Inventories of new and existing homes for sale are at high levels, putting downward… More »

The Aspen Institute's Initiative on Financial Security is trying to build support for new policies to promote saving for those on low or moderate incomes. At a roundtable today the possibilities were discussed with a range of interested parties, including finance-industry types and Congressional staffers. (You can download a copy of the group's recent report, "Savings for Life", here.) One idea is "child accounts", similar to those launched in… More »

Ben Bernanke gave the Cato Institute a handsome anniversary gift for their 25th annual monetary conference this morning. He used the occasion to announce new procedures for disseminating information about Fed policy. Starting with the release of the October 30th FOMC minutes (due on November 20th) the Fed will provide "a fuller discussion of the projections", projections for a slightly different set of variables (add PCE inflation, subtract nominal GDP)… More »

The Wall Street Journal's editorial writers are impressed by a new study on income mobility: The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly… More »

Great news. 'Happiness research" might be having an effect on policy in just a few more decades, according to the New York Times. Instead of pursuing happiness, we will be entitled to it, and guided to it by wiser minds. The era of laissez-faire happiness might be coming to an end. Some prominent economists and psychologists are looking into ways to measure happiness to draw it into the public policy realm. Thirty years from now, reducing unhappiness could… More »

A student at Columbia defends the character of American academia as the outcome of a ruthless market process in which excellence prevails (link via Economist's View):In reality, conservatives ought to appreciate academia, because it’s a vicious market system. Professors have absurdly specific training in tiny career fields. A guy who spends years writing a dissertation on the importance of beads to indigenous tribes in Brazil really wants the world’s other bead… More »

I loved this column by the ever-stimulating George Will, comparing "American Gangster" and "The Godfather": In spite of its self-conscious coldbloodedness, the "Godfather" movie is sentimental. Its picture of Don Corleone judiciously administering the common law of gangsterdom is about as accurate a portrayal of organized crime as Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" is an accurate portrayal of the unwashed brutes who made the Middle… More »

I went to a preview of the movie based on Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" this weekend (thanks for the tickets, Sandy). This from Amazon, about the book, if you need reminding:The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites… More »

The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn has written a new piece on health reform, recognising and then questioning what he calls the best argument against universal coverage--the risk that it would suppress medical innovation. Cohn writes:More than a decade ago, Michael Kinsley, the journalist and former editor of this magazine, developed Parkinson's disease--a degenerative condition that impairs motor and speech control, producing tremors, rigidity, and eventually… More »

My Monday column for the print FT: For the Democratic party’s most energetic supporters, consensus and bipartisanship have become dirty words. In this, the party’s activists are following the lead of the Bush administration, which feels just as strongly about compromise with opponents. But it is a mistake for the left, just as it was for the right – as a matter both of intellectual vitality and of hard-nosed political calculation – to indulge this aversion… More »

The historic visit of Nicolas Sarkozy to the nation's capital, to address both houses of Congress and seal a new rapprochement ("bringing together") of France and the United States, caused no undue excitement in the New York Times and Washington Post. The Times's front page had market jitters, Pat Robertson's endorsement of Giuliani, Musharraf, protections for gay workers, and "Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing". The new… More »

Alan Dershowitz advises the Democrats not to look soft on national security--and not to rule out torture in all conceivable circumstances. He approves of the (Bill) Clinton doctrine on the issue:Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism--the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture… More »