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Social Security and Medicare: Silly Season

One of the victims of this recession apparently is the media’s incapacity for sorting out what are longer term and therefore structural problems from those that are simply temporary and whose existence is co-terminus with the downturn itself. Yesterday’s New York Times provides us with a classic example. It contained a breathless article about the […]

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GM and Credit Default Swaps

Don’t you wish you’d never heard about credit default swaps? I do. Somehow they have become inextricably linked in my mind with AIG and our great financial crash. Now I bet that GM also wished the darned things would go away. Lenders buy credit default swaps to insure themselves against loss when a company they […]

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Our Trade Problem

Today’s trade release by the Commerce Department is interesting from a number of angles. Let’s get the hard data out of the way first: the US trade deficit widened in March, which is the month for which we have the latest information. The gap between exports and imports rose to $27.6 billion, up from $26.1 […]

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