News
Bloomberg | Mid-Sized Banks Split From Wall Street in D.C. Lobbying
Mid-sized banks that mostly let Wall Street and small firms speak for the industry during the debate over the Dodd-Frank Act have decided it’s time to carve out their own agenda in Washington.
CNN Money | Gas shortage continues in areas hit by Sandy
Many of the gas stations in the New York City region were still out of commission Friday due to the effects of Superstorm Sandy, and long lines continued to form at the stations that are still operational.
WSJ | Manufacturing Expands, Construction Spending Rises
The U.S. manufacturing sector expanded last month, but employment weakened, according to data released Thursday by the Institute for Supply Management.
Bloomberg | Japan May Have Entered Recessionary Phase, Some BOJ Members Say
Japan’s economy, the world’s third biggest, may have entered a “recessionary phase,” according to some Bank of Japan board members.
WSJ | Banks See Mortgage Requests Rising
Americans are increasingly asking their banks for mortgages but banks are wary of lending money to buy homes, a trend that could crimp the housing recovery.
Econ Comments & Analysis
CNN Money | Europe is 'main drag' on global recovery
The world's two largest economies have been showing signs of improvement, but experts say the recession in Europe remains the biggest challenge to sustained global growth.
WSJ | Daylight-Saving Time Is Past Its Prime
Saturday night marks the end of daylight-saving time for 2012. Time for those clocks to "fall back" an hour to standard time, when the sun really is highest at high noon.
Bloomberg | Disasters Create Bigger, Not Better, Government
Whew. That was the general reaction when President Barack Obama told waterlogged New Jersey that “we are here for you.” After all, these days, a president is expected to “be here.”
Real Clear Markets | One Year Later, Occupy Wall Street, Keynes, and Pyramids
I certainly do not claim to be an Egyptologist nor do I have any particular or special knowledge of Egyptian pyramids or archeological expertise outside of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But there is a kind of historical ubiquity to those pyramids in the Egyptian desert, particularly in what they can potentially represent even to the modern mind.
AEI | Dodd-Frank and too big to fail receive too little attention
When, in the first debate, Mitt Romney referred to the Dodd-Frank Act as "a big kiss" for the Wall Street banks, he opened a discussion that has received too little attention in this election season.
Blogs
WSJ | World-Wide Factory Activity, by Country
Manufacturing in much of the world remained in contractionary territory in October, but there were signs of hope as China returned to expansion and U.S. growth continued.
Economist | Losing interest
People earn income from a variety of sources. In the United States, almost $1 trillion of household income comes from the interest on assets Americans have accumulated over time, while about $180 billion is paid out in interest payments.
Coordination Problem | Newsflash: Crony Capitalism is a Creature of the State
My colleague Matt Mitchell is presenting his paper "The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism." Matt is part of the research team at Mercatus set up to study American capitalism.
AEI | Has Obama failed by his own measures?
Progress under Obama has kept the unemployment rate above 8 percent for most of his presidency (administration officials predicted unemployment would not go above 8 percent and would be below 6 percent by now), lowered real family income by 5 percent, and left 12 million people unemployed, about one-third of whom have been out of work for more than one year.
WSJ | Economists React: ‘Naive’ to Think of Sandy as Stimulus
Superstorm Sandy will influence the U.S. economy for at least the next few months. Gauging the disaster’s effect requires assessing economic activity that might be lost entirely against activity that is substituted with other products or services (like when entertainment spending falls but hardware-store sales rise).
AEI | Net neutrality as ‘crony capitalism’
In a famous 1959 article, Ronald Coase called out the Federal Communications Commission for letting political pressures affect the allocation of valuable broadcast licenses. More than 50 years later, not much has changed.
National Review | The Paradox of Energy Efficiency
Lighting efficiency has improved during the last three centuries by many thousand-fold, from sputtering candles to modern LEDs, as Jeff Tsao and his colleagues from the Sandia National Laboratory note in the July 2012 issue of the journal Energy Policy. But the result “has been an increase in demand for energy used for lighting that nearly exactly offsets the efficiency gains.”
