Trading Our Way Out of Crisis - Pascal Lamy On Carry Traders and Long Term Interest Rates - Rajiv Sethi Defining the university curriculum - UnderstandingSociety Baselines, Counterfactuals and the Stimulus - Econbrowser Credit Writedowns - links Felix Salmon -...

More on what's wrong with modern macro, this time from Axel Leijonhufvud: Stabilities and instabilities in the macroeconomy, by Axel Leijonhufvud, Vox EU: Fifty-some years ago, students were taught that the private sector had no tendency to gravitate to full...

Tim Duy: The Fed in a Corner, by Tim Duy: Over the years, I have warned a seemingly countless number of undergraduates that Fed's hold on monetary independence was tenuous at best. Independence is not guaranteed by the Constitution. Congress...

Interest rates: the phantom menace - Paul Krugman A big Fed mess - Free exchange Relief for States and Families Boosts Employment - CBPP Stabilities and instabilities in the macroeconomy - voxeu.org Do elections in developing countries improve economic policy?...

At MoneyWatch, I attempt to explain why employment lags output in recoveries, and why the lag has been increased after 1990:What Causes Employment to Lag Output in Recoveries? I give three reasons, and then use one of them to try...

At MoneyWatch: The Dodd Proposal to Restructure the Federal Reserve System Concentrates Power and Politicizes District Bank Governance, by Mark Thoma: A proposal from Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd changes the selection process for key positions within the Federal...

The economy needs more help from the government, but it's unlikely to get it: The Big Squander, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NYTimes: Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program ... released his report on the...

I agree with this: Threatening the Fed's independence, by By Alan S. Blinder, Commentary, Washington Post: The Federal Reserve's performance in this ... crisis deserves separate grades. For the early crisis period, from the summer of 2007 until a few...

China, the Renminbi, and Global Imbalances View - Econbrowser On Rational Expectations and Equilibrium Paths - Rajiv Sethi Bills offer clear path to better health care - Peter Orszag U.S. Mortgage Delinquencies Reach a Record High - NYTimes.com Treasury to...

Robert Reich refuses to give up on the public option: Harry Reid, and What Happened to the Public Option, by Robert Reich: First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers...

Jeff Sachs says that if world population doesn't stabilize relatively soon, we're headed for trouble: Transgressing Planetary Boundaries, by Jeff Sachs, Scientific American: We are eating ourselves out of house and home. ... The green revolution that made grain production...

When Paul DeGrauwe presented this paper at the What's Wrong with Modern Macroeconomics conference (papers here), his argument that rational expectations models are the intellectual heirs of central planning seemed to ruffle a few feathers: Top-down versus bottom-up macroeconomics, by...

At Failed Banks, Post-Mortems Disclose Excessive, Yet Obvious, Risk - NYT How credit conditions will shape the economic recovery - voxeu.org Dollar Diplomacy Flip-Flop is a Threat to Free Trade - CFR Explaining Time, the Universe, and All That -...

Edward Harrison catches this quote from Obama: The president is in Beijing as part of his tour through several Asian countries to address economic challenges. He spoke candidly about the precarious balancing act his administration is trying to perform. He...

Simple question. If George Bush was president instead of Barack Obama, would the discussion and criticism of the war in Afghanistan be different? Why has there been so little attention to this issue? This has been bugging me for quite...