Author Archives: wciecon
Guest post: Mark to market
Commenter JKH has been doing some thinking about mark-to-market and its role in the current crisis, and WCI is delighted to report that he has been good enough to put those thoughts together and agree to have them posted here: Lurking in the background to the credit crisis and the unfolding policy responses to it […]
My spam filter has become Skynet
I've been receiving messages to the effect of "What happened to my post?" from several long-time and valued contributors. Currently, comments are not moderated, so they should appear immediately. If I see spam, I delete it ex post. It would appear that my spam filter has noted that the comments I delete have links, and […]
Rent-seekers at the gates
The next few months are going to be brutal, and the second week of the next few months is going to be excruciating. StatsCan releases the Labour Force Survey numbers on the first Friday of the month, and those numbers will almost certainly be worse than the month before. Apocalyptic headlines over the weekend will […]
Neil Reynolds goes off the deep end. Again.
Gaaah. This is just crazy. I generally try to avoid fisking, but this is a case where so many clangers pile on top of each other like so many cars in a train wreck that there simply isn't another way of pointing out the awfulness of what Mr Reynolds has inflicted on unsuspecting Globe and […]
A valuable tip for new econobloggers
Brendon of Shock Minus Control provides my favourite comment on WCI: I may have to write a post about gold to get my traffic up. Its like a loss leader – come for the hysterical discussion of long refuted exchange rate regimes, stay for the delicious forecast models.
The stable “Anglo Saxon” model of finance
Nouriel Roubini is not alone in declaring the "Anglo Saxon" model to have failed. Chris Dillow disagrees. He shows that, judging from GDP numbers, the "Anglo Saxon" countries are not doing worse than the others, so news of the instability and death of the Anglo Saxon model may be exaggerated. But it all depends on […]
At least we don’t have the Gold Standard to worry about
Will this crisis be as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930's? One important difference is that we don't have the Gold Standard now. That's one good reason for optimism.
Sales taxes, other taxes, expected deflation, and Calvo price-setting
Gauti Eggertsson has an important ("preliminary and incomplete") working paper. It has been discussed by Mark Thoma and Justin Wolfers. The main argument is that tax cuts could cause expected deflation, which would raise real interest rates if nominal rates are stuck at zero, and this would reduce aggregate demand and output. Tax cuts are […]
Cheer up, Andrew Coyne
It may well be that "there is no longer anything resembling a conservative party in this country". OTOH, there is no longer anything resembling a progressive party in this country, either.
On the benefits of school choice: a not-particularly-clean natural experiment from Quebec
In an earlier post, I noted that Ontario Catholics are able to choose between sending their children to the (Catholic) separate schools system or the public system, while non-Catholics can only go to public schools. Separate schools systematically outperform their public school counterparts, even though they receive the same funding and draw from almost-identical populations. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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