In today’s issue of the Wall Street Journal, economics editor David Wessel has a useful column about policy uncertainty—worries about government spending, the expiration of provisions in the tax code, inflationary expectations, and the like—and its role in hampering economic growth by discouraging private investment. (The piece is available online to WSJ subscribers here.)...
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Ronald Coase, the 101-year old, Nobel Prize-winning economist from whose essay, “The Lighthouse in Economics” the Independent Institute takes its logo, is at it again: tweaking his fellow economists for being out of touch with reality in a new piece in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review (HBR), “Saving Economics from the Economists.” Economics...
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Go to the website of the Detroit Medical Center and you will learn that its facilities are ranked among the “nation’s best hospitals” by US News & World Report and that they have won other awards. The Detroit Medical Center has some of the “best” heart doctors, it is “tops” in cancer care, and...
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This “no surprise here” story in the San Francisco Chronicle shows that Silicon Valley, broadly defined as four Bay Area counties, has now surpassed New York City as the top source for Obama campaign contributions, providing a staggering $14,703,167 to his current reelection campaign, as against New York City’s “mere” $14,529,760. If we, as...
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Dennis Haysbert is the actor I remember best for playing the president of the United States in several of the Jack Bauer 24 seasons. You probably know him better as a spokesman for Allstate. In one commercial, he is standing in front of a town that looks like it has been devastated by a...
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When the September unemployment figures were announced a month before the presidential election as having miraculously declined to below 8% for the first time since the current administration started, more than a few speculated that there may have been some book-cooking in the back room. In response, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, said she was...
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Real private fixed investment—the main driver of genuine economic growth—has recovered less than half of its loss between 2006 and 2010. As of the second quarter of this year, the amount of real private fixed (i.e., not including inventory) investment had barely recovered enough to exceed the low point it hit during the dot.com...
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Following on my recent post citing corporate CEOs’ complaint that continuing “Regime Uncertainty” forestalls their companies’ investing and hiring, corporate CFOs are today following suit, as reported by DeLoitte’s “CFO Signals“: CFOs’ expectations for sales and earnings growth both dropped precipitously this quarter, and their expectations for capital investment and hiring followed suit. The...
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As a young woman, I took over a business that was bankrupt: its liabilities exceeded its assets by a considerable amount, and the wolf was well and truly at the door. Lots of people thought I was foolish not to “erase” its debts through filing bankruptcy and be given a “clean slate” by the...
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The latest feminist volley, “Finding balance requires changing the lives of men,” from Professors Joan C. Williams and Anne-Marie Slaughter, calls to mind nothing so much as “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant short story projecting to its logical conclusion what the demand for strict equality would result in: everyone equally handicapped. Thus, as employers...
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