Either way, the point is it has kept me from blogging in the mornings and probably will for a little while longer. However, I've just come across something to keep things going! Paul Krugman grappling with Friedrich Hayek. That one should keep the blogosphere bitching for a while -it usually does. In fairness to Hayek, he was talking about Britain - I'm not sure if their data looks similar to our trends during this period or not. I imagine it does, though.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Quick link
I've been pretty busy drafting a report on title insurance... it's getting to the somewhat embarassing point of actually being fascinating to me - I'm enjoying writing it. Part of that is that I don't usually get to write much at work (I normally do the data work) so writing a forty page paper on a pretty obscure real estate cost is a nice change of pace. Part of it, I'm sure, is Stockholm Syndrome.
The Robbins/Plant/Gregory letter is quite right that abolishing restrictions on international trade and investment makes sense during a recession.
ReplyDeleteIn a period of falling trade and investment, who could say it is wrong to have more trade and investments?
Besides, when Robbins/Gregory/Plant say that with public sector debt, "obstacles to readjustment [are] very much greater than the frictions an dobstacles imposed by the existence of private debt", are they necessarilly wrong? Banks can recall loans from bad private lenders easily. But for the government, it is easy enough to repay old bonds by issuing new bonds or from tax revenues.
PS: Does Brad DeLong have a beak and ten tentacles? Earlier, why wasn't he using two of his tentacles? Were the other eight on the computer blogging, and two of them writing research reports?