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If You Go to a Birthday Party at a Restaurant and Somebody Skips Out, Who Pays Her Bill?

Akal Singh Krau is an extremely interesting guy who is a law student at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). A few months ago he invited me to give my standard doom-and-gloom talk to bum out his peers, and we realized that he literally grew up down the street from where I currently live. Anyway, since […]

Potpourri

* I know we rarely say nice things about Matt Yglesias around here, so I should point out this really good post arguing that the comparison of legislation to sausage making is unfair to the sausage makers. * EPJ links to a very interesting story about how Business Insider got hacked. Really, you should check […]

Bill and I Don’t See Eye to Eye on Estate Taxes

Check out this comment from “Bill” when Alex Tabarrok discussed estate taxes: Having been the surprising beneficiary of an uncle’s demise, I can assure you that estate taxes, or rather the absence of them, are quite a surprising windfall. You see, my uncle never paid taxes. He did all he could ever do to defer […]

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few…

I made a joke comment at MarginalRevolution, and then another commenter wanted me to elaborate, so I did: What I meant was, when I was reading Black’s collection of essays, and hit the one on interest rates as an option, I made an intuitive connection between the major project I was grappling with at the […]

A Quick Note on Recapitalization

In November of 2008 I had a long phone conversation with the impregnable von Pepe, which clarified the typical discussions of the financial crisis in light of my hazy knowledge of accounting. In fact I was so energized after the call that I set out to do a whole series of blog posts sharing my […]

Is the Fed Monetizing the Debt?

Some of us have been surprised at how low the yields on Treasury debt continue to remain, despite the government’s explicit and implicit promises of future deficits. Given all the shenanigans, I have suspected that somehow the Federal Reserve has been buying much more of the Treasury’s bonds than we are being told. In this […]

Thomas Schelling: Nuclear Weapons Are Like the Log-Plume Ride…

…the anticipation is scarier than the realization (HT2MR): In summary, a “world without nuclear weapons” would be a world in which the United States, Russia, Israel, China, and half a dozen or a dozen other countries would have hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and mobilize or commandeer delivery systems, and would have prepared […]

Bernanke Will Be Revered By Future Fed Chairs

Afraid to ask Congress* last year for the authority to issue the Fed’s own debt to the public, Bernanke decides it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission: The U.S. Federal Reserve on Monday pressed ahead toward the creation of a new mechanism it says could be used to withdraw money from the banking system […]