Greece Update

My go-to guy on Greece these days is Harris Mylonas, a fellow Yalie from a few years back, now teaching at GW. Here's his latest take on coalition negotiations in Greece. Bottom line: new elections in a few weeks are looking increasingly likely, and the result might yield something more stable. Also check out his …

More Evidence for Greek Default

The Economist has a chart up today comparing growth rates pre- and post-default in recent years. Interestingly, countries have typically grown faster after default than before. There are reasons to be skeptical of a causal relationship, but it still shows that default is no disaster. Scholarly work by John Ahlquist also has shown that default …

Monday Morning with Marx

For those who followed the neo-Marxist debates on state theory in the 1970s (or were forced to learn about them by one’s professors), one of the more interesting contributions came from James O’Connor's book, The Fiscal Crisis of the State. In essence, O’Connor argued that the state must simultaneously execute two conflicting functions: an accumulation …

Greece is the (wrong) word

Here is the reason why a subscription to the WSJ is worth the money: because they run pieces by people like John Cochrane.   I've been trying to make sense of the Greece mess, but I was missing the key.  Here it is: Letting someone lose money on sovereign debt is the acid test for the …

Here’s the Fuss

About a month ago, Jonathan Capehart asked, "Hey, Tea Party, why all the fuss?" He cites some evidence---rather thin evidence, but evidence all the same---that many self-identified Tea Partiers are at the moment in decent financial shape. So what are they upset about? That is a bit of a disingenuous question, since much of the …

Krugman’s Hackery on Deficit Hawkery

Just about everything Paul Krugman writes nowadays is in some way related to rationalizing the Obama deficits. Now, Krugman's a smarter man than I, but I think it's pretty clear that his partisanship drives his economic analysis these days, rather than the other way around. Yesterday Krugman turned a case against the euro into a …

Bail Out or Bail? The Eurozone and Greece

The transatlantic political class has taken up the cudgels on behalf of a Greek bailout. Even the Economist has joined the parade, warning of "contagion" to other European economies if a rescue package is not approved. Megan McArdle, while skeptical of a bailout, also resorts to the contagion meme and compares Greece's current difficulties to …