First from Reuters: Fed’s Lockhart: Can’t wait too long to tighten (ht Alan) The Federal Reserve needs to be “anticipatory” and not wait too long to tighten monetary policy, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said in an interview published on Friday. … Lockhart is a voter on the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, which meets June 23-24.

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Rising Rates: The Next Fed Meeting Will be Interesting

Michael Doyle writes: Sotomayor’s finances look a lot like the average person’s | McClatchy : Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor owns a condo valued at $1 million in New York’s Greenwich Village but otherwise is a woman of fairly modest means, a newly filed report shows. On Thursday, Sotomayor advised the Senate Judiciary Committee that she has savings of about $32,000 as well as $15,000 in credit card debt

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Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps? (McClatchy Edition)

This is Greenspan , the former head of the Fed, whose job it is to keep the entire banking system afloat despite its inherent bankruptcy: “Government guarantees of the liabilities of institutions viewed as too big to fail thwarts the competitive process that produces capital efficiency,Of all the regulatory challenges that have emerged out of this crisis, I view the [“too big to fail”} problem and the…precedents, now fresh in everyone’s mind, as the most threatening to market efficiency and our economic future.” These guys are usually better out of office than in. If we could just keep everyone out of office, we’d be good to go.

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Oh Please. Can you believe it?

Download now or preview on posterous Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/slow-income-growth-and-absolute-poverty-in-th at Brad DeLong’s Scrapbook

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Slow Income Growth and Absolute Poverty in the North Atlantic Region, 1800-1870 (DRAFT of Chapter 6 of Slouching Towards Utopia?: The Economic History of the World in the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2010)

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, uttered inconvenient truths to those who would manage the world’s economies in a startling plenitude that could be neither ignored nor validly denied. Her speech made the front page of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. While blasting both the power wielded by the US Fed and the Bank of England and the directions in which they are wielding it, Merkel may not have uttered the ultimate truth the government is not fit to “manage” the money supply or the economy, still she has opened the debate the legitimacy of their powers in a way that only the head of the government of Europe’s largest economy could do

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Truth from Power? Merkel on the Fed

Note: some of the decline in occupancy rate is seasonal, and the rate should increase during the Summer months – especially since leisure travel has not declined as much as business travel and Summer has a higher mix of vacation travel (see: Hotels: “By the numbers” ) From HotelNewsNow.com: STR reports US performance for week ending 30 May 2009 In year-over-year measurements, the industry’s occupancy fell 10.2 percent to end the week at 51.6 percent.

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Hotel Occupancy Rate Falls to 51.6%

Suppressing market interest rates to the lowest level possible seems to have become a key objective for central banks around the world as they respond to the turmoil in financial markets, the decline in output and the deterioration in the labor market.However, it is a fatal policy: it amounts to fighting the correction of the debacle which has been caused by central banks’ downward manipulation of interest rates through a relentless increase in bank circulation credit and the money supply. FULL ARTICLE

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Bad News for Our Money

Paul Waldmann: Judicial Abstraction More Evidence That Girls Kick Ass at Math, Just Like Boys John Kay: Salutary lessons from the downfall of a carmaker Felix Salmon: Bernanke’s fiscal focus Google Book Search Settlement Agreement Matthew Yglesias: Google and Orphaned Works Larry Elliott: It’s a funny old game: where is the dream team of economists to tackle the slump? Steve Levitt: The Anti-Macroeconomics Roar Grows Louder Levey: I Had No Idea Sotomayor Smear Campaign Would Blow Up | TPMDC Paul Krugman on Robert Samuelson: The stagflation myth Paul Krugman: Feldstein on global warming

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links for 2009-06-04

The Crimson reports : The number of seniors entering finance and consulting has fallen from 47 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2008 to 20 percent for the current Class of 2009. …More seniors indicated that they would be working in the fields of education and health care. The large increase in the number of seniors entering education—from 10 percent to 15 percent in the past year—likely reflects the popularity of programs like Teach for America, which received applications from a record-setting 14 percent of Harvard seniors, according to data released by the organization

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What Harvard’s new graduates are doing

This was released earlier this morning … From the ISM: May 2009 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business® The NMI (Non-Manufacturing Index) registered 44 percent in May, 0.3 percentage point higher than the 43.7 percent registered in April, indicating contraction in the non-manufacturing sector for the eighth consecutive month, but at a slightly slower rate . The Non-Manufacturing Business Activity Index decreased 2.8 percentage points to 42.4 percent.

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May ISM Non-Manufacturing Index Shows Slower Contraction

The Obama regime’s ” antitrust surge ” continues: The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether some of the nation’s largest technology companies violated antitrust laws by negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another’s employees, according to two sources with knowledge of the review. The review, which is said to be in its preliminary stages, is focused on the search engine giant Google; its competitor Yahoo; Apple, maker of the popular iPhone; and the biotech firm Genentech, among others, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

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The Surge Continues

Henry Farrell: The carpers and the hurlers on the ditch might complain that Jean-Yves Reb hasn’t reached for his rifle in the intervening ten years… GillianTett: Leverage creeps back on to the radar Robert Waldmann: Vague thoughts on a Sharp Essay John Cole on Walter Williams: “The Fact That I Am Completely Wrong Is Just More Proof How Right I Am” Yet More Blind Damned Choir Boys Blogging (Courtesy of Ann Bartow, Courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden) Ezra Klein: The Tyranny of the Economists – The Tyranny of the Economists DeLong: The hidden purposes of high finance Paul Kedrosky: Tikal Timbers and Time: Despoiling the Nest Jack Hidary: General Rick Sanchez Calls for War Crimes Truth Commission Dean Baker Has Had It with Robert Samuelson California: The ungovernable state Martin Feldstein: Tradeable Gasoline Rights Paul Krugman on Gary Becker: Getting Fiscal Martin Wolf: Why Britain has to curb finance Robert Skidelsky: Anatomy of Thatcherism Atul Gawande: The Cost Conundrum Alan Blinder: Crazy Compensation and the Crisis Paul Krugman: Medicare and the VA Dambisa Moyo: Aid Ironies: A Response to Jeffrey Sachs William Easterly: Sachs Ironies: Why Critics are Better for Foreign Aid than Apologists Jeffrey Sachs: Aid Ironies Jeff Frankel: Telling China to Stop Buying Dollars Now Would Be Even More Foolish Than Before Felix Salmon: Understanding Taleb David Beckworth: GDI vs. GDP Hilzoy: In Which I Disagree With Megan McArdle Some More Erica Werner: Obama Aims To Build Momentum For Health Reform Gideon Rachman: Obama and the limits of soft power Infinite Regress Department: Mark Thoma’s Links for 2009-06-02 Thirty years of the 30-Year | The Big Picture

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links for 2009-06-03

The Chicago School is eclipsed – THE WEEK : Richard Posner, leader of the Chicago School of Economics and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals judge, uses his new book, “A Failure of Capitalism,” to try to rescue the Chicago School’s foundational assumption that the economy behaves as if all economic agents and actors are rational, far-sighted calculators. In some sense, Posner must try. For without this underlying assumption, the clock strikes midnight, the stately brougham of Chicago economic theory turns into a pumpkin, and the analytical horses that have pulled it so far over the past half- century turn back into little white mice

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We Are Live at "The Week" with the Eclipse of the Chicago School

By Edward Hugh: Barcelona Well, as Claus pointed out in his last post , Japanese data is pretty much a mixed bag at the moment. Industrial output shot up in April, and the May PMI data suggested that the easing of manufacturing contraction continued in May. However household spending and retail sales fell, unemployment rose, and the CPI reading suggested the Japanese economy is once more getting itself firmly wedged in inflation territory

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More Than "A Whiff" Of Deflation In Japan

Robert Gordon: Grasping Reality with Both Hands: “Death of the Wehrmachtl” : I am currently writing a book review of the impressive Tooze book “Wages of Destruction”. Contra Brad’s description, this is not military history but rather economic history. My initial criterion to assess the value of the book is to ask “what is new” as compared to the Abelshauser chapter in the Mark Harrison edited (1998) volume on the Economics of World War II.

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Hoisted from Archives and Comments: Robert Gordon Reviews Tooze’s "Wages of Destruction"

I won’t ask if they think Americans are this stupid, since they obviously do. Leaving aside the question of whether carbon needs to be capped, since that has nothing to do with whether doing so “creates jobs” on net, is there a non-drone, non-bought-and-paid-for human being on this earth who thinks throwing obstacles in the path of production “creates jobs” in a non-trivial sense? Couldn’t I, with equal justification, say that forcing every business to destroy its roof and then build a new one out of clay, or chopping off every third worker’s right hand, would create an analogous series of jobs

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Capping Carbon Creates Jobs, Citizen! Here’s How!

From Kevin Drum: Chart of the Day | Mother Jones : This isn’t really big news or anything, but Gallup’s latest poll shows just how big a hole the Republican Party has dug itself into: they now have virtually no appeal to anyone non-white.  They’re almost exclusively a party of white men and women, which explains why their base has convinced them to haul out racial fears as their main line of attack against Sonia Sotomayor.  I just hope they aren’t surprised when their meager 11% non-white base declines even further after this is all over.

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On the Whiteness of the Whale

From the Institute for Supply Management: May 2009 Non-Manufacturing ISM Report On Business® Economic activity in the manufacturing sector failed to grow in May for the 16th consecutive month, while the overall economy grew for the first time following seven months of decline, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®. … Manufacturing contracted in May as the PMI registered 42.8 percent , which is 2.7 percentage points higher than the 40.1 percent reported in April.

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ISM Manufacturing Shows Contraction in May

Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the rule of law. Epstein lays out a minimalist definition and a more expansive definition when considering the protection that individuals might have when facing the power of the state or the sovereign

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Epstein on the Rule of Law

Bruce Bartlett on Liberaltarians Paul Kedrosky: Honey, I’m Done with the Whole Treasuries Thing Jeffrey Rosen et al.: Online NewsHour: — Sexual Harrassment in the News- March 25, 1998 Alexander Gourse: The Old War on New Deal Ryan Powers: Mitch McConnell: I Have ‘Better Things To Do’ Than Ask My Party To Stop Calling Sotomayor ‘Racist’ Hilzoy: Sotomayor: The Record (via SCOTUS Blog) Scarecrow: NYT David Kirkpatrick Hit Job: Sotomayor Preoccupied by Race and Ethnicity The Cure – Friday I’m In Love Lyrics – Friday I’m In Love – Lyrics On Demand Matthew Yglesias » The Hard Cases Are Hard

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links for 2009-06-01