Ben Bernanke, a Great Depression scholar who guided the Federal Reserve through the 2007-2008 financial crisis, won the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics “for research on banks and financial crises” (see story here). He’ll share the prize with two other American economists less fa[...]
Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
September 27th, 2022 - 5:41 pm § in Economics
A cynic’s view of falling home and stock prices
After the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve flooded the financial system with money to create a “wealth effect.” Your house isn’t worth more, but if it has a higher dollar value (because dollars are worth less), you’ll feel richer and spend more. That’s the theory behind “w[...]
I like Robert Reich, but he’s wrong about price controls
I liked him when he was Clinton’s labor secretary, because of his labor-friendly policies and defense of working-class people, with whom I’ve identified since my youth. Reich (bio here), a Dartmouth and Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law School graduate, has been a professor at [...]
GOP senator’s Social Security rescue plan: Go back to work
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who has the temerity to ask Wisconsin voters to re-elect him after calling Capitol rioters “tourists,” has come up with another bold idea. (He’s nothing if not imaginative.) “There are a number of innovative ideas I would support,” he told const[...]
I’m used to racist/sexist GOP candidates, but a lobotomized one?
Disclaimer: Just because I’m used to them, doesn’t mean I vote for them. Blake Masters, 36, is the 2022 Arizona GOP nominee for U.S. senator. He wasn’t born stupid, as he has B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford, so his cerebral cortex must have been pithed at some point, perhaps as[...]
GOP governors deny federal rent aid to working poor because it’s “socialism”
Republican governors in at least three states — Mississippi, Arkansas, and Nebraska — have turned away hundreds of millions of federal pandemic relief dollars allocated to preventing evictions because they don’t want their residents to receive those funds. In March 2022, Nebraska G[...]
August 3rd, 2022 - 2:17 pm § in Economics
Cheap groceries
Need to economize at the grocery checkout to stretch your budget? This chart might help. (Source: here) Return to The-Ave.US Home Page[...]
The worst Democrat in Congress
Henry Cuellar (D-TX), widely considered the most conservative Democrat in Congress, and already notorious for firing a pregnant staffer (details here) even before the FBI raided his house in what looks to possibly be a bribery investigation (details here), thinks the $7.25 federal minimum wage is to[...]
How America screwed up its power grid system
The question isn’t whether the grid will buckle and fail — it already has in places. Or when; obviously during summer heat waves or winter storms. Or why: Because of more air conditioning and electric cars. The question is how did we screw up our power system, and who screwed it up? The [...]
Billionaires love the GOP, and the GOP loves billionaires
It’s not really surprising that Republicans don’t care about the little guy. For working-class Americans, waging “culture war” comes at a cost of voting for policies that benefit wealthy donors at their expense. Read story here. Return to The-Ave.US Home Page[...]