News
Washington Times | Obama will urge lawmakers to act on his economic to-do list
Wielding a lengthy “to-do list” of economic proposals, President Obama is bringing the bipartisan congressional leadership to the White House on Wednesday to urge them to act on his proposals or risk being portrayed as a do-nothing Congress heading into November.
CNN Money | Keystone isn't the only pipeline
At least a dozen new oil pipeline projects are slated to move forward in the United States over the next few years, bringing controversial sources of new crude to market despite the holdup of a portion of the Keystone pipeline expansion.
USA Today | Eurozone avoids recession in Q1, thanks to Germany
Europe dodged a bullet, as the combined economy of the 17 countries that use the euro narrowly avoided recession in the first quarter of the year.
WSJ | EU Reaches Deal on Basel Rules
European Union finance ministers agreed Tuesday on revised draft legislation on how to implement the Basel III accords on banking capital and liquidity, after last-minute changes granting more powers to member states.
Bloomberg | U.S. Senate Sends Export-Import Bank Measure to Obama (Update 2)
The U.S. Senate voted to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank for three years and increase its lending authority 40 percent by 2014, clearing the measure for President Barack Obama’s signature.
Econ Comments & Analysis
NBER | Who Suffers During Recessions?
In this paper we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the cyclical sensitivity during the Great Recession to that in the early 1980s recession.
WSJ | In Greek Drama, 4 Potential Endings
As Greece careens toward another election, it's growing more likely that the country will crash out of the euro—but it is not yet inevitable.
National Review | Once Again, Break Up the Banks
Et tu, Jamie Dimon? The embarrassing announcement of a large trading loss at J. P. Morgan has brought the issue of bank regulation back to the fore.
Politico | Too big to fail bigger than ever
JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion blunder is throwing the spotlight on an awkward truth for President Barack Obama’s promise to end the era of big bank bailouts: The same institutions that were deemed “too big to fail” before the financial collapse are even bigger now.
WSJ | The Big Danger With Big Banks
In the early 1950s, when I was a young college graduate and a new employee of the Frost Bank, my great-Uncle Joe Frost, then CEO, told me that the very first goal we had was to return the deposits we received from customers. Our obligation was to take care of the community's liquid assets and manage them safely so others could use them (via loans) to grow.
WSJ | Democracy and the Euro
One way to look at this week's events in Greece is as George Papandreou's revenge. As Prime Minister last November, he proposed that Greeks vote on whether they could live with the conditions the EU and IMF were imposing in return for a bailout. The idea sent markets into a tizzy, Mr. Papandreou lost his job, and the referendum never occurred.
Blogs
Heritage Foundation | U.S. Free Trade Agreement with Colombia Enters into Force Today — Finally!
Following through on President Obama’s announcement last month in Cartagena that the U.S.–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement will take effect on May 15, 2012
Economist | The no-growth zone
It is another grim day for European markets. Break-up worries continue to grow. You can read Charlemagne on yesterday's disappointing euro-group meeting. The news has gotten worse today, as Greece's political parties seem to have failed to form a government, meaning that new elections will be held in June.
Atlantic | What Is Causality?
What I find really interesting is there are some fairly basic principles for how analysis can get really screwy but which can't be fixed by adding more control variables, increasing your sample size, or fiddling with assumptions about the distribution of the dependent variable.
WSJ | Stagnant Wages Limit Consumer Spending
Consumers managed a soft 0.1% gain in April retail sales, which suggests consumer spending is contributing only modestly to second-quarter economic growth.
The American | New study: It was technology that smashed private-sector unions
When the productivity of unskilled labor is (relatively) high it pays for the union to organize a lot of firms and demand generous wages. The shift from an artisan economy to an assembly line economy during the beginning of the 20th century was associated with an increase in the (relative) productivity of unskilled labor that led to an increase in unionization and a decrease in income inequality.
Political Calculations | Enabling Disability Fraud
We were inspired by Climateer Investing's summary of the econoblogosphere's ongoing analysis of the increasing level of disability fraud in the U.S., where hundreds of thousands of people would appear to be ending up after their extended unemployment insurance benefits expire
