Clive Crook

The Fed should target nominal GDP not inflation, argues Christy Romer in the NYT. I agree with her, for reasons I argued here.There are two parts to this, and one is more troublesome than the other. The simpler part is that the Fed can influence changes in NGDP--the money value of output, or "demand"--more directly than it can influence inflation. The Fed has no control over the way a change in demand divides between higher real output and higher prices. Therefore,… More »

Occupy Wall Street's communal villages are modeled on an ungoverned island nation off the coast of Africa More »

As I write, Europe's leaders are still meeting in Brussels, wrestling for the nth time with a debt-restructuring scheme for Greece and, much more important, a plan to address the wider European sovereign-debt crisis. It is important to understand that these are very different issues. If the Greek state is insolvent (admittedly, not everybody thinks it is), then dealing with its debts is a question of apportioning unavoidable losses among creditors and taxpayers… More »

The other day I commented on Herman's Cain's 9-9-9 plan, which turns out on closer analysis to be three VATs for the price of one. Replacing taxes on incomes and profits with a national sales tax, which is what Cain appears to be proposing, would indeed be simple--but not if you collected it in three tranches, each with its own tax-gathering apparatus and associated complexities. Now, in something of the same spirit, the US is offered the alternative simplicity… More »

Ken Rogoff gives an excellent interview to the McKinsey Quarterly. I wasn't surprised by his emphasis on the housing market.The Quarterly: Is there any way to accelerate our pullout from this contraction?Rogoff: ... [U]nfortunately, there is no easy out. Perhaps the best chance would be to find a way to get ahead of the mortgage defaults--that is, to have restructurings and debt forgiveness, albeit with some kind of quid pro quo. That is very hard to do. But if… More »

Simplicity is its selling point, but there's a hidden hike in the tax proposal offered by the former Godfather's Pizza CEO More »

The former governor should pay closer attention to one of his advisers, who says housing is broken and needs to be fixed More »

It's beyond ridiculous that the Brooker Prize judges denied Julian Barnes for so long More »

Why has President Obama embraced the Wall Street protesters, and does he understand what they really want? More »

On Friday the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll was released. The focus of this latest study was the interaction between household confidence and debt, personal and public. Ron Brownstein describes the findings for NJ: Credit Scarred. The full poll results, well worth browsing through, are here. Seen as a forward-looking economic indicator, they are bleak. They make especially painful reading for Democrats, by the way, because they suggest… More »

Rebecca Rosen investigates. [S]he'll book your appointments, check the weather for you, remind you to pick up something at the store. These are classic personal-secretary tasks, and somewhere around 97 percent of all secretaries in America are of the female persuasion. She can be a little saucy, but just a little. (Interestingly, Siri is not a lady all around the world. Her British self is a man; her Australian self is a woman. Feel free to float your own theories… More »

Since the early days of this recession, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has been arguing for audacious action to repair the housing market. He warned that a growing overhang of foreclosed properties would suppress the recovery, and how right he was. It's a difficult problem but the failure to confront it effectively has been the biggest missing piece in the policy response of the administration and the Fed. Feldstein is still banging on about it (How to Stop the… More »

America trusts the president more than it trusts Republicans in Congress, but that doesn't mean his recent liberalism is working More »

A recent paper by Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute attracted attention. It attacked the popular view that "regulatory uncertainty" was holding the economy back. There was no convincing evidence for this, it argued. Trends in investment (this recovery, weak as it may be, has been "investment-led" by historical standards), in hiring, and in hours worked all suggested that lack of overall demand is the problem. I thought the paper was clever and… More »

No disrespect to Tim Cook or the other outstanding executives Steve Jobs put in place, but I will be surprised if the company's best years are not behind it. Apple's founder is irreplaceable. Dead at 56. How terribly sad that he won't be there driving the firm and enriching our lives for another 20 or 30 years. As he surely would have been, if he could: difficult to imagine him ever retiring except through incapacity. That was not Jobs.His traits were amazing one… More »

Inflation has started to moderate, Ben Bernanke tells the JEC. He pointed to a market measure showing that inflation expectations have come down, signaling investors expect more economic weakness ahead. That is putting it mildly. According to the Cleveland Fed, 10-year expected inflation has fallen to 1.37%. In ordinary times, the Fed aims to keep inflation between 2% and 2.5%. Even if you are excessively cautious, and believe that a spell of higher-than-target… More »

Did the Obama administration make a political mistake in pushing for a Supreme Court decision on its health care law? More »

Looks promising. What I want is a jacket-pocketable tablet, optimised for ebooks in indifferent light, sufficiently durable not to need a case--no cases, please--with usable web-browsing and pdf display. And the option, should the need arise, to watch a movie. The Kindle Fire may be it. At the moment I find myself choosing between packing my Kindle and my iPad. A residual sense of the absurd stops me carrying both (especially if the laptop's in there as well).… More »

As a would-be immigrant, I am an admirer of most things distinctively American. The great exception is this country's system of criminal justice. More »

A memorably violent review of "Confidence Men". Issues of accuracy, fairness, and integrity come up nearly every time Suskind publishes something. Key sources claim they've been misrepresented and misquoted, that basic facts are wrong, and that the Pulitzer-winning reporter has misconstrued the larger story as well. One discounts such complaints to some extent, of course. Good journalism often makes its subjects unhappy, and the kind of Bob Woodward-style White… More »