In 2005's fictional "Countdown to a Meltdown," The Atlantic magazine's James Fallows describes America's coming economic crisis by looking back from the election of 2016 -- when the 46th president of the United States will be the first since before the Civil War to be neither Democrat nor Republican...

Can the US Hold China Responsible for the Pandemic?

I had been meaning to write a post about oil prices and the economy. Now this article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki has beat me to it--and done it well. It's not that long and so I recommend reading it. I'll hit one highlight and then add a couple of my own thoughts.

In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, “Think You Know the Natural Rate of Interest? Think Again,” James Mackintosh warns about the high level of uncertainty in recent estimates of the equilibrium interest rate—commonly called r* or the natural rate—that are being factored into monetary policy decisions by the Fed.

When I posted on Frank Knight's case for Communism the other day, I also put it on up on Facebook and had some people wondering about context. Those of us who are fans of Frank Knight don't think of him as a Communist. Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, to name two well-known economists, credit Knight for much of what they learned when they studied in the Ph.D. economics program at the University of Chicago: Friedman well before WWII and Buchanan after.

Bitcoin is a scam that’s only good for criminals. That’s what Four Nobel Prize winners in economics said about the top cryptocurrency by market cap. Nobel laureates James Heckman (2000), Thomas Sargent (2011), Angus Deaton (2015), and Oliver Hart (2016) expressed collective skepticism when asked about bitcoin at a UBS panel discussion this week.

All James Kisor may want is for the Department of Veterans Affairs to alter the effective date of his veteran disability benefits, but his legal challenge to the VA’s denial of his claims has given the Supreme Court an opportunity to revisit one of the more problematic doctrines in administrative law: Auer deference, under which federal courts are obligated to defer to permissible agency interpretations of their own regulations.

While the economic gains for many people in advanced economies are significant in some respects, in others they have been eroded by unexpected challenges. We examined a range of economic indicators, such as employment and wage growth, benefits, prices for basic and discretionary goods and services, and savings for retirement, and found that outcomes for individuals in three roles—workers, consumers and savers—present a more nuanced picture than the aggregate data might suggest.

On February 27, 2018, Judge Shelly Dick issued a preliminary injunction in Atchafalaya Basinkeeper v. United States Army Corps of Engineers temporarily blocking the completion of an extension of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP), a 24-inch buried pipeline, designed to transport up to 480,000 barrels of various grades of crude oil over about 163 miles from Lake Charles Louisiana to terminal facilities in St. James Louisiana.