The Age of Niallism: Ferguson and the Post-Fact World
Bluster cannot make untruths true. More »
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Has the U.S. Passed Peak Car?
Matthew O'Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics. He has previously written for The New Republic.
Electronic pollution is hurting the economy More »
A counterfactual history of the past four years. More »
The worst legacy of the Great Recession is the worst long-term joblessness since the Great Depression More »
Forget gold. If Scrooge McDuck were around today, he'd be diving into a big pile of capital gains. Okay, and maybe some dividends too.The charts below, courtesy of Bob Williams of the Tax Policy Center, compare where the merely rich and the super-rich get their money from. The first shows the breakdown for households with adjusted gross incomes of $1 million or greater, but who aren't among the top 400 tax filers. The second shows the same for that latter group.… More »
We finally know the real winner of the euro crisis. It's Australia.Would you believe it if I told you that Australia's financial sector is worth more than the eurozone's financial sector? Well, it doesn't matter if you believe it or not. It's true. The technical term for this is "jaw-dropping." The chart below, from Cullen Roche of Pragmatic Capitalism, puts it all in rather stunning picture perspective.It turns out that depressions aren't so good for banks. A big… More »
It's time to put down Ayn Rand, and pick up Milton Friedman. More »
Paul Ryan's plan is a path to prosperity for Mitt Romney. More »
Congratulations, world. It's been five years since the credit crunch began, and the global economy began to gradually -- and then all at once! -- implode. The good news is we avoided the abyss. The bad news is we didn't avoid a lost half decade. It's been a particularly bad time for equity investors. Stocks will hopefully be better in the long run, but the medium run has been pretty miserable -- in the United States, China, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and… More »
India might have 99 problems, but finding a place to keep all its Olympic medals ain't one. They're not so good at winning those -- a little bit better than Michael Phelps. In their entire history.Why does a country with a billion plus people only have 24 Olympic medals? Well, there's more to capturing athletic glory than having more people than other people. Consider the chart below, which compares the populations and medal hauls of the most successful nations… More »
There's one certainty about the economy. Uncertainty is bad for it.Actually, there's another certainty about the economy. Uncertainty never goes away. Sometimes we forget this; then we belatedly remember it. This alternating cycle of optimism and pessimism is what Keynes famously called "animal spirits" -- in other words, the psychological drama that drives our economic drama. And it does drive the economy. Consider the chart below, which compares the inverted… More »
A silver bullet into the heart of Keynesianism, this is not. More »
Repackaging the Bush agenda, just with austerity, is not the path to prosperity. More »
This is not what a recovery looks like. This is what stall speed looks like. In other words, a lost decade in the making. (Actually, make that another lost decade in the making).The chart below compares core PCE inflation with the employment-population ratio since 2010. The former is the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation -- it shows how much more households spend, minus food and gas costs -- and the latter is the percentage of adults with a job.… More »
Unemployment is above target and inflation is below target, and the Fed is doing nothing. What? More »
Companies and households aren't "doing fine" for a recovery, but they're doing better than normal. More »
Zombie banks don't eat people. They eat recoveries. More »
If you're reading this, congratulations. You survived the Great Currency War of 2007-12.What? You didn't realize there was a currency war? Well, there was. At least if you listened to Brazil. The gist was that countries would competitively devalue their currencies to try to get a trade advantage over their rivals. There's nothing wrong with doing this during a global slump -- it's how recovery started during the Great Depression -- but there is a tremendous risk.… More »
Do you like food? Yes? Well, I've got some bad news. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) expects the historic drought hitting half the country to push up food inflation next year.But it's not as bad as you might think -- the jump in food prices, that is. The drought is a once-in-a-half-century disaster amidst once-in-a-century temperatures. The chart below from the USDA puts it in perspective.The drought has been particularly bad news for the corn crop --… More »
