Author: Bears Chat at The Wall Street Examiner

Ex-Fed chiefs run to form Commentary and weekly watch by Doug Noland CNBC’s Andrew Ross-Sorkin, March 15, 2013: ”The question of the morning: Do you…

Q4 2012 Flow Of Funds
Commentary and weekly watch by Doug Noland

For years, I would anxiously await the opportunity to sift through each new voluminous quarterly Z.1 ”flow of funds” report from the Federal Reserve. On a quarterly basis, the Federal …

Surprise, surprise: the GOP used overly-pessimistic estimates, in order to justify ending Medicare

http://newsatjama.jama.com/2013/02/21/jama-forum-the-forecast-slowdown-in-medicare-spending-is-more-coming/

The biggest news was the “baseline”—defined as the CBO’s projections of federal revenues and spending assuming current laws remain unchanged. As has happened annually since 2010, the CBO lowered its forecast of federal health spending growth, independent of any policy action. Medicare and Medicaid costs combined are expected to be 15% lower in 2020 than was forecast just 3 years previously. In dollars, the savings for Medicare over the next 7 years are nearly $400 billion, about two-thirds as much as the revenue from the expiration of some of the high-income tax cuts that happened this January.

The Fed and Chinese risk Commentary and weekly watch by Doug Noland This from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis president James Bullard on…

There’s a lockdown on the Wikipedia page for Austrian economics and wouldn’t you know it, one or way or another, it all seems to be Paul Krugman’s fault.

Broadly speaking, Austrian economics, for those who have not yet had the pleasure of being introduced, are characterized by an extreme distrust of state intervention in markets, a distaste for statistical modeling and a general confidence that markets, left to their own devices, will avoid booms and busts and nasty things like inflation. From a political perspective, Austrian economics tends to lurk to the right of even such conservative icons as Milton Friedman.

For more detail, you can go, of course, to the Wikipedia page for Austrian economics. But until at least Feb. 28, if you do so, you will find that the page “is currently protected from editing.” An “edit war” has been raging behind the scenes. Two factions were repeatedly deleting and replacing a section of text that had to do with a description of a critique of Austrian economics made by economist Paul Krugman.

The closer you look, the more the whole affair appears at first to be a demonstration of Sayre’s Law, which holds that “in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.” One side, which seems from the Talk page chronicling the argument to  be just one very stubborn person, is objecting to the inclusion of Krugman’s critique on the grounds that what Krugman describes as Austrian economics doesn’t actually represent the reality of Austrian economics. In other words, it’s as if Krugman was saying “the problem with blue is that it is red.” Therefore, his views should not be included as an example of a valid critique. The other side is basically saying that Krugman is Nobel Prize-winning economist whose opinion is well worth including according to the standards of Wikipedia. So there. And back and forth the argument went, with lots of torturous discursions into the process weeds of Wikipedia editing policies, until it got too heated and provoked a lockdown.

http://www.salon.com…e_on_economics/