Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

When our great nation was started, Americans had a high degree of trust in their government. They felt that it genuinely represented the interests of the people. Government policy in developed countries is relatively stable and predictable, and, for the most part (at least relative to less developed countries), promises made are promises kept. Governments keep their promises despite the fact that policymakers face a well-known time-consistency problem. That is, it is seldom in the short-run best interest of a government to keep capital taxes low, honor its debt obligations, or inflate the currency only by the expected amount. Much of the theory on credible government policy concerns itself precisely with accounting for this ability of governments to make and keep promises. In these good scenarios, households trust the government and the government does not betray this trust because a deviation by the government causes a reversion to a worse equilibrium. Depending on your point of vi...

I get a lot of valuable information from my various conversations on Google+. One gentleman whose insights I particularly value is Keith Keber . Keith is a real thinker, and although in some respects he seems to be somewhat left of center, we’ve conducted several interesting conversations and debates, and regardless of whether we agree or disagree, he conducts himself in an intelligent and respectful way, and I’m always happy to read his opinions. Keith opines: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Few have analyzed the source of private financial support for the Internet Censorship Act (my own pet name for the bill), but I would venture that Big Pharma has spent more on it than Big Entertainment. Here are some familiar names from the House Judiciary Committee on SOPA/PIPA corporate supporters: Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies (ASOP) Pfizer, Inc Elsevier (as a proxy for Merck) Pharmaceutica...

GREEK CRISIS: A serious debt crisis in Greece has rattled global financial markets and raised worries about whether other countries will be able to repay their debts. LEHMAN REPLAY: Economists are worried that the Greek crisis, if not contained, could turn into a repeat of the cascading financial panic that occurred in the fall of 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsed. DEBT RESCUE: European countries and the International Monetary Fund are racing to assemble a package of loans for Greece that will be sufficient to convince markets that the country will not default on its debt obligations. Concerns have already surfaced in Congress that the broad demands of the sovereign debt crisis will quickly exhaust the I.M.F.’s reserves and leave the United States, the fund’s largest shareholder, with the bill. Professor Nouriel Roubini, the New York-based academic who was one of the few to anticipate the scale of the US financial crisis, told a panel in California that the buildup of debt i...

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment. - Dorothy Nevill Economic wisdom's rule of thumb for a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Problem is, by the time the data finally gets in so those pencil-head economists can draw the grey shaded area on the charts, its six months too late. The stock market is a better indicator - a 20% decline from the high being an indicator we're in a bear market, and a bear market being a pretty good indicator that we've entered a recession. We haven't quite reached the 20% mark yet, but it could be here in another week or so. In a Yahoo Finance poll I saw today, 67% of respondents felt the market would continue to go lower. That's not bearish enough for a bottom - you need to have something like 90% of the respondents throwing in the towel, and we are far from there yet. I don't want to sound alarmist...