Economics

Calculus and the Housing Bubble

Jun 24th, 2008 | By | Category: Economics

Bored tonight, I’ve been playing around with the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices dataset that was just released. With all the hysterical coverage around the housing bubble, it seemed like fun to use some of my high school calculus. Yeah, yeah, I could just graph the index over time, but why not graph the derivative? Ah […]



Happy 10th Anniversary, EU Central Bank: The Only True Free Trade Agreement

Jun 10th, 2008 | By | Category: Economics

Happy tenth birthday, European Central Bank! My, how you’ve grown. Why? Because it’s hard to be a little bit pregnant. The EU represents the only true free trade agreement between nations today. Grab any responsible economist, and they’ll admit to you that free trade requires radical changes between countries. Ahem, in short, to get the […]



The Cooper Union Speech

Mar 31st, 2008 | By | Category: Economics

Have you heard Obama’s Cooper Union Speech? You should. The key except: A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s why we’ve put in place rules of the road: to make competition fair and open, and honest… I think that […]



The Era of Fraud

Mar 24th, 2008 | By | Category: Economics, Environmental

The deadly, fraudulent, heparin sold by a Chinese manufacturer to Baxter shares much with the deadly, fraudulent, wheat gluten and gluttonous, fraudulent, financial crisis. These frauds are not accidents, slips of care, but rather deliberate attempts to game tests of quality, to turn garbage into gold. The toxic wheat gluten was doped with melamine, in […]



Howto: Create a Financial Crisis

Mar 17th, 2008 | By | Category: Economics

Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist at the IMF and now a professor at Harvard University, said the greenback may drop another 12 percent on a trade-weighted basis.“This recession will be long and deep and when we get out of it, we’ll have inflation,” How did this happen? This stick-figure cartoons sorts it out for […]