Bailout 2.0 Reactions

Read them at your leisure: Paul Krugman isn't sure what this says, but he's working on some optimism. He also recycles a joke that I haven't heard since the annual…

Bailout 2.0

I didn't get a chance to see Geithner's press conference talking about the plan to stabilize the banks. But I understand that what was presented was an outline of a…

The Unbearbable Dishonesty of Being the News Journal

The News Journal Editorial Board has decided to weigh in again on the Recovery Package — against FTR — and to do so in a way that serves not only as a symbol of the real lack of basic economic knowledge of folks in the media, but also is an example (one of many) of how awful this paper continues to get. To wit:

  • They complain that the package does not follow economists’ guidance of being “quick, temporary and targeted.” The OMB, of course, tells us that 65%+ of the House Bill will be spent in 2 years (the stated goal) and 75%+ of the Senate Bill will be spent in the next 2 years. If you read the bill at all, you’ll note that the multiple hundred pages of these bills is a targeted list of spending priorities and none of them comes with a perpetual spending provision. Additional money to the Recovery program pools would need to be authorized by Congress in subsequent budget years.
  • Their only stated measure of the quality of the bills is the total price tag — so that the Senate Bill ends up being better than the House Bill because it is cheaper. If you are going to invoke economists’ guidance for the shape of the bill, you’d think that they’d do that to assess the quality and effectiveness of the bill.

    • (more after the jump.)

BWW’s Owners are Liquidating

Article from today's NJ. TommyWonk reviews his previous assessment of this situation and what this likely means for the Blue Water Wind project: It’s clear that BNB’s once formidable empire…

Gulf States Taking Lead on Clean Energy Investments

The NYT did an article almost a month ago showing how the Gulf States are looking beyond their carbon riches to thoughts of becoming a clean energy exporter:

So even as President-elect Barack Obama talks about promoting green jobs as America’s route out of recession, gulf states, including the emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are making a concerted push to become the Silicon Valley of alternative energy.

They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.

“Abu Dhabi is an oil-exporting country, and we want to become an energy-exporting country, and to do that we need to excel at the newer forms of energy,” said Khaled Awad, a director of Masdar, a futuristic zero-carbon city and a research park that has an affiliation with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is rising from the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Instead of insisting that their carbon resources will last forever, or even insisting that economies will always be dependent upon carbon, the oil-rich Gulf States are looking to hedge their wealth and market dominance by making huge investments in research and development in the major labs in many premiere western nations. And we know that the person who pays for the research typically owns the work product or at least the patents on resulting products; the country that exports the energy reaps the economic benefits.

On Boosting Congressional Financial Literacy

Steven Pearlstein, a business columnist for the Washington Post writes a scathing column asking for a Personal Financial Trainer for every Representative and Senator in Congress. Pearlstein isn’t concerned about overheated rhetoric — he is pointing out the real deficiencies in knowledge here, deficiencies (no matter the policy differences) are actually pretty scary. He finds bipartisan abuses:

(In response to Senator Johanns trying to distinguish between spending and stimulus) Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

(Discussing Senator Nelson’s claim that $1.1B dollars isn’t effective stimulus)…Maybe the senator could use that opportunity to explain why a dollar spent by the government, or government contractor, to hire doctors, statisticians and software programmers is less stimulative than a dollar spent on hiring civil engineers and bulldozer operators and guys waving orange flags to build highways, which is what the senator says he prefers.

Pearlstein’s excellent rant ends up with what I’m guessing is the real target of the piece — Republicans. If only because they were able to suck up alot of the media space over the past few weeks, they’ve had many chances to show off their real ignorance:

Verizon Math Fail

OK, this may have limited amusement potential, but I thought that this was hysterical: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCJ3Oz5JVKs[/youtube] (h/t The Big Picture)

Senate Recovery Bill Text

PDF of the Senate Version -- S. 336. The Huffington Post has an embeddable copy of the bill (via docstoc) at their site, and they are asking for volunteers to…