The socialist within

It’s Friday night in this side of the Western hemisphere, so, what the heck. I think you might find it funny. Here’s a bit of U. S. public debt history.

Does the average tea-party fan know better?

Found via The Big Picture.

On the rise and decadence of Detroit (1950-2009)

Detroit, 1950-2009

Time Magazine has an interesting article by Daniel Okrent about Detroit’s fate. What was once known as America’s Arsenal of Democracy and became the fourth largest city in the United States, shows signs of accelerated decay. Unemployment rate is almost 30%, business is all but (almost) shutdown, and the town of Robocop has nothing but a gloomy future. What is relevant in Okrent’s piece is his discussion on the political economy of Detroit’s failure. Populist politicians, overconfident automobile companies and pampered unionized workers intertwined to make of this Michigan city a urban disaster. Check out the pics of Detroit’s remains by Sean Hemmerle. They’re quite scary.

Sessions of the Second Latin American Economic History Congress

Here is the list of preapproved sessions  of the Second Latin American Economic History Congress (CLADHE-II), to be held in Mexico City on February 3-5, 2010. To submit a paper to any of the sessions, you have to go here.

More on Lehman Brothers (1850-2008)

Before arcane CDOs imploded...

The Wall Street Journal presents a neat infographic on the new jobs of Lehman’s executives after its bankruptcy in September 2009.

Found via Chart Porn.

On Lehman Brothers

Those were happy times...

After the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve denied to rescue Lehman Brothers, the once almighty investment bank failed a year ago, beginning what would turn to be the mother of all financial crises.

Here is an exclusive Reuters interview with Richard Fuld, the president of Lehman at the time of its bankruptcy.

The New York Times has published three good pieces on the issue: ‘An Epidemic of Capital Destruction’, Tales From Lehman’s Crypt (showing the lives and fates of three former Lehman employees) and Lehman Had to Die So Global Finance Could Live. It also has a neat visualization showing the market capitalization of the biggest financial firms in Wall Street from October 9, 2007 to September 11, 2009.

The Economist’s Buttonwood has recently posted an interactive map showing global indebtedness, from 1999 to 2011. It’s worth visiting.

Web shopping: On Krugman and Expedición 1808

Ben, Olivier and Bob

Disclaimer: Sorry about the delay in completing this post (holidays and tons of work impeded its prompt publication).

Here’s an article by Paul Krugman on the state of economics and the failure of most mainstream economists to imagine the worst-case scenario (i. e., the world financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession of our days). Here are some reactions of Krugman on the reception of the piece in the blogosphere. And here’s a great post by Beatrice Chérrier at History of Economics Playground exploring Krugman’s ambiguities on the methodology of macroeconomics.

Now, on to diminishing my credibility. Here are the ads of the TV show I am part of. The feature was recorded in the first semester of 2008.  It will run on Saturdays and Tuesdays at 19 h in NatGeo, the National Geographic channel covering from Tijuana to Ushuaia. I have not heard enough reactions to the show to have an statistically significant image of what people think about it (so far partiality prevails) If you live in the Western hemisphere and have the chance to watch it, I’ll be more than glad to hear your comments on my unexpected debut in television.

Mexican Economic History courses online

Diego Rivera's Pan American Unity mural, Panel 3, City College of San Francisco.

I have finished the last details of the website for the Mexican Economic History course  at UNAM, of which I am a teaching assistant. Here is part I and here is part II. I’m pretty sure the bibliography in the course is a neat overview of recent economic history in this country.

By the way, here’s an article published in the Washington Poston about rising unequality in the USA by Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at UC Davis and author of A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World.

Web shopping: Lucas, Skidelsky, Statistics, Protectionism, and Male Purses (!)

• Robert Lucas, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a welcome defense of the predictive power of economics-as-it-is, on occasion of The Economist’s recent criticism on the discipline.
• Lord Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer and Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, also argues in defence of economics in spite of the Queen’s interpellation to the discipline. Here you can read it in the Financial Times and here in his personal website.
• An interesting article in the NYT on statistics as a profession that faces growing demand and even better salaries.
• A neat note in The Economist on “The Slide to Protectionism in the Great Depression: Who Succumbed and Why“, an NBER working paper by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science in the University of California at Berkeley, and Douglas Irwin, Professor of Arts and Sciences in Dartmouth College.
• An article in The Economist on a new Museum of Handbags and Purses in Amsterdam, with historical evidence of the non-metrosexuality of male purses. Here’s an excerpt:

The very first object on display—the oldest in the collection—proves that man bags are nothing new. It is a 16th-century pouch made of creamy white kid skin. The surface is decorated with rosettes and 18 tiny pockets of the same soft leather. It was probably made for a travelling merchant. At the time men’s clothes did not have pockets, and the bag provided a quickly accessible sorting system for multiple currencies, each pocket reserved for the coins of a particular city.

That’s it for now. I can’t wait to read Ben’s opinion on the WEHC in Utrecht.

Web shopping: Schwartz’s view of the Fed’s monetary policy

Professor Schwartz

Recently Michael Hirsh interviewed monetary historian Anna Schwartz for Newsweek. She doesn’t sound happy at all about the state of monetary policy in the face of the financial crisis. Excerpts:

Anna Schwartz is 93 and has been working at the same place since 1941. She’s that rarity in economics, or indeed any field: a living legend from another era who hasn’t lost a step mentally and who grasps everything that’s going on around her in the present. Or at least she seems to—but more on that later. Schwartz is one of the most renowned monetary scholars in the world. She’s the woman who authored, with Milton Friedman, The Monetary History of the United States—the book that launched the free-market counterattack against Keynesianism in the early ’60s. And now, as she surveys the wreckage of the last two years, Schwartz has one thought: if only Milton were here. “Ever since his death I have lamented the fact that he has not been around to express his views on what’s going on,” she told me the other day at her mid-Manhattan office at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Web shopping: On Minsky revisited

"…the first thing we do when we discuss Prof. Minsky is show reverence."

Via Brad DeLong: Here is a nice entry by Interactive Investor on financial cycles and crisis. The chart above is theirs.

Also, don’t hesitate to read this (fake) Goldman Sachs Internal Memo.

On The Economist view of what the crisis means for economics

The meltdown of modern economic theory.

The Economist has published on its last edition three articles on the impact of the crisis on economics as a science. The first article is a general view on the matter, the second has to do with macroeconomic debates and the third on the state of financial economics.

I think that readers will find it interesting to read the reflection of The Economist’s writers on this issue. How is it that economics got into this impasse?

Here are some excerpts that I found interesting in each of the articles.

On “Stocks for the Long Run”, revisited

The book in question

Financial journalist and “The Inteligent Investor” columnist Jason Zweig writes in the Wall Street Journal on the consistency of long-term stock market time series used in Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks for the Long Run book. In his article, Zweig questions how useful and reliable is to analyze financial markets with (weakly constructed) historical stock-market data, and argues against a popular belief that relied on these time series, i. e., that equity returns excede bond returns in the long-term.