What happens next? [More]

Obama signs the Wall Street reform bill. [More]

Good Morning! News time: [More]

From Good: I don't mean to be a downer or a fear monger, but this chart is simply scary, especially compared to what the already scary job chart showed last month. The dotted line (which doesn't count the Census workers) has stalled dramatically from the upward trajectory it was on. As m... [More]

“Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors,” says Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They’re wrong. And we can prove it.” [More]

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense. [More]

A program designed to reduce energy consumption persuaded some Republicans to consume more. [More]

We criticize an American Economic Review article that presents itself as a theory of design innovation and fashion cycles. Scrutinizing the model and surrounding prose, we suggest that the article does not make clear what it is that it purports to explain, and that the story of the model fails minimal requirements of factual relevance and intuitiveness. Our broader message is that many “theory” papers are best regarded as mere model-building, a genre of creative writing masquerading as science. [More]

How does high fashion make a profit when they do not garner large numbers of orders? [More]

Fashion should be taken seriously, argues Jason Potts [More]

Amid all the optimism that the consumer is back, it’s worth considering one of the reasons why: a huge tax refund season. [More]

A shortage of real-time data hinders evaluations of the impact of the global crisis on developing countries. This column uses a “microsimulation” approach to assess the poverty and distributional effects in Bangladesh, Mexico, and the Philippines. It finds that poverty will increase by well over a million, and that the crisis has been hardest for middle-income households. [More]

Wondering what’s behind those recent jobless recovery numbers? [More]

The federal government has spent more than it has raised every year since 1970,except for a four-year period at the end of the Clinton Administration. [More]

oh no... [More]

In other words, yes, in terms of unemployment milestones, this was the worst recession since the Great Depression. [More]

Someone asked if we could really eliminate the budget deficit by taxing the rich. The answer is no, but we could make it smaller by taxing the rich. The Wall Street Journal's David Wessel runs the numbers. [More]

Critics of conventional macroeconomic models -- critics of the Rational Expectations and Efficient Markets Hypotheses in particular -- are often accused of simply rehashing old complaints (e.g. see the second paragraph of The Economist article mentioned below). This paper from the INET Conference attempts to depart from “familiar complaints” about REH and EMH. The paper argues that RE requires a mechanistic model of expectations that cannot possibly capture "the diversity of 'reasons' upon which individuals in real-world contexts might base their decisions," and then it offers an alternative approach to modeling expectations: [More]

As I have discussed often in earlier posts, pessimists are starting to worry about excessive debt levels in China, about which they are very right to worry, and many are predicting a banking or financial collapse, which I think is much less likely. Optimists, on the other hand, are blithely discounting the problem of rising NPLs and insisting that they create little risk to Chinese growth. Their proof? A decade ago China had a huge surge in NPLs, the cleaning up of which was to cost China 40% of GDP and a possible banking collapse, and yet, they claim, nothing bad happened. The doomsayers were wrong, the last banking crisis was easily managed, and Chinese growth surged. [More]

AS March Madness winds down, it’s time to turn our attention to the next major sports event on the calendar. That’s right, the National Football League draft, now a three-day extravaganza with the first round broadcast in prime time on April 22. [More]

The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. [More]

Sugar cane farmers from a tiny Mexican county use savvy marketing and low prices to push black-tar heroin in the U.S. [More]

From California to downtown Detroit, there's a green revolution sweeping across the nation — and it's changing the weed business forever [More]

Are people innately fair-minded or is it learned behavior? A fascinating new study, "Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment," that is a big step toward resolving this question is being published today in the journal Science [subscription required]. The researchers find strong evidence that market institutions cause people to treat each other, especially, strangers more fairly. The research is based on the results of behaviorial experiments in 15 different societies which have varying amounts of integration into markets. [More]

The well-groomed brokers and traders bent on sticking up for Wall Street gathered on Wednesday in best-behaved form — no chanting, no shrill whistling, pretty much no noise at all — to mark the formation of the financial world’s modest alternative to the Tea Party movement. [More]