In a series of posts (most recent here), I’ve noted that oil and natural gas prices have become unhinged from each other. Oil (denominated in $ per barrel) used to trade at 6 to 12 times the price of natural gas (denominated in $ per MMBtu). But lately that ratio has been north of 20, [...]
Archive for December, 2010
Can Natural Gas Replace Oil for Diesel?
Posted in Energy, Environment, tagged Energy, Natural Gas, Oil on December 24, 2010 | 4 Comments »
CBO Weighs in on Fannie and Freddie
Posted in Budget, Finance, Regulation, tagged CBO, Fannie Mae, Finance, Freddie Mac, GSE, Housing, Regulation on December 23, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its long-awaited report on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Role in the Secondary Mortgage Market (written by Deborah Lucas and David Torregrosa, with input from a cast of dozens — including, full disclosure, me as an outside reviewer) provides an [...]
The Economics of Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Posted in International, tagged Iraq on December 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Follow the money. From Al Capone to Watergate and beyond, that’s been sound advice for anyone trying to understand the workings of shady organizations. In the latest installment, a group of researchers at the RAND National Defense Research Institute have analyzed accounting ledgers that document the activities of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in Anbar province [...]
The Touch and Feel of Record Cotton Prices
Posted in Microeconomics, tagged Commodities, Cotton on December 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Cotton prices hit another record earlier today. As noted by the San Francisco Chronicle: Cotton futures in New York jumped to a record, gaining by the daily limit for a third day, on signs that growers may struggle to meet mounting demand from China, the world’s biggest consumer. Cotton for March delivery gained 2.7 percent [...]
Google More Popular Than Wikipedia … in 1900
Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged Google, Humor, Wikipedia on December 18, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Google unveiled a new toy yesterday. The Books Ngram Viewer lets users see how often words and phrases were used in books from 1500 to 2008. Other bloggers have already run some fun economics comparisons. Barry Ritholz, for example, has does inflation vs. deflation, Main Street vs. Wall Street, and Gold vs. Oil. In the [...]
Johnny Depp and the New Tax Law
Posted in Budget, Politics, tagged Budget, Humor, Taxes on December 17, 2010 | 6 Comments »
When the President signs the big tax deal later today, will he be cutting income taxes for most families or sparing them a tax hike? Will he be slashing the estate tax or resurrecting it? Those questions have a clear answer in the official budget world: the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation [...]
Steve Martin Gives a Lesson on Sales Taxes
Posted in Microeconomics, tagged Humor, Taxes on December 13, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Steve Martin–yes, the wild and crazy guy–has a new novel. “An Object of Beauty” tells the story of Lacey Yeager, an up-and-comer in New York’s art world in the mid-1990s. I’m 19% of the way through the novel (up to location 779 in Kindle-speak), during which Lacey has been climbing the ladder at Sotheby’s, the [...]
The Grinch Recast as Economic Parable
Posted in Microeconomics, Regulation, tagged Coase, Humor, Pollution, Property Rights on December 9, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Over at Forbes.com, Art Carden has a brilliant retelling of Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (ht: Greg Mankiw). Carden recasts the story as a parable about externalities and property rights. He starts with the Grinch’s view that Who singing is a nuisance: He hated the shrieks of the Who girls and boys For fifty-three years he’d put [...]
200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
Posted in Data, International, Macroeconomics, tagged Data, International, Visualization on December 2, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Courtesy of the BBC. here’s the newest version of Hans Rosling’s famous presentation on economic growth and life expectancy. Keep an eye out for the moments in history when life expectancy plummets.
A Second Thought on the Cost of TARP
Posted in Budget, Finance, tagged AIG, Auto, Banks, Budget, CBO, Finance, TARP on December 1, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Two commenters (Jack B. and John L.) raise an important point about the $25 billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office recently placed on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Their concern is that the $25 billion figure includes some impacts that should rightfully be attributed to other government actions, not to TARP itself. To illustrate, suppose that [...]
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