Was Prohibition the best thing that ever happened to drinkers?
Seriously. National Prohibition was the culmination of some eighty years of state and local prohibitions. Its “failure” discredited alcohol prohibition so badly that almost all states discarded it...
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Happy National Weak-Ass Beer Day!
April 7 occupies a special place in American beer history. Despite the title of the post, it’s a good place. On April 7, 1933, after thirteen years of Prohibition, Americans could legally drink beer...
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Working men are p***ed
Unemployment at 4.9%. More than 75 straight months of continuous job growth. Per capita GDP at an all-time high. Summer’s here. But nobody’s dancing in the streets. Here are a couple graphs that may...
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A taste for temperance: How American beer got to be so bland
This new article of mine in Business History has nothing to do with the economic and financial crisis, but it’s gotten more press than any previous article I’d written, so I thought I’d post a link...
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Alright, Hamilton!
The latest currency news is that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is going to put a woman’s face on US currency for the first time. That is good news, of course, and way overdue. But the devil is in the...
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How the US economy is like Luke Wilson in “Idiocracy”
See for yourself. Our anemic economic performance since 2007 is . . . the best in the world? Yes, it’s still a slow recovery that has yet to restore full employment, but, except for Germany, we’ve done...
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Legalize It — The Economic Argument
I wrote this one for The Huffington Post, so I will send you there. The essence of the argument is that the expected benefits of legalization far exceed the expected costs, so it’s worth doing. The...
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Extend those unemployment benefits already
Yesterday 1.3 million jobless Americans lost their unemployment benefits, thanks to Congress’s unwillingness or inability to extend long-term unemployment insurance funding. The number could rise to...
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Six years of pain
Six years ago this month, the US economy officially peaked. We didn’t know it till a year later when NBER made the call, but the labor market has never been the same. The unemployment rate crept upward...
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Declare victory and taper?
Wednesday the Federal Open Market Committee did the expected, by announcing a “tapering” off of its $85 billion monthly purchases of long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS’s),...
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Greenspan Sees No Bubble in Dow 16,000
(headline) Well, that settles it. Heavy sarcasm aside, we do have the major stock indexes hitting record highs in a still-lousy economy. And thanks to that lousy economy and the Fed’s expansionary...
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Companies love misery
“Dow up on optimism tepid jobs report keeps Fed stimulus going” – headline, CNBC, today In other words, a lousy labor market is good QE-bait. Like I said before.
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Dammit Janet, I love you!*
I am very pleased with the president’s nomination of Janet Yellen to be the next Federal Reserve Chair. Ms. Yellen has impeccable credentials, the best economic forecasting record of any recent Fed...
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No taper, no problem
The Federal Open Market Committee concluded one of its most anticipated meetings in a long time with the expected decision to keep its federal funds rate target near zero (0 – 0.25%) and, less...
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Impossible Germany
The Eurozone has had famously high unemployment rates since the euro’s inception in 1999, and for most of that time Germany has been a key sufferer, with unemployment over 8%. Since the financial...
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7.4%: Good news you can’t use
Another first Friday, another BLS employment report, and the headline news is pretty good: In July the official unemployment rate fell to its lowest level, 7.4%, since 2008. If you were a White House...
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Employment report: Black and white is always gray
Has the dust settled yet on last Friday’s BLS employment report? The big news was that the economy generated 195,000 new jobs in June, better than expected, and revised data show 70,000 more new jobs...
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This just in: College is costly
Don’t worry, it’s still worth it, in a big way, at least on average. But that’s another story. This chart here has some interesting stories to tell: (1) The big difference between average published...
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The top 1% are different. Yes, they own more financial assets.
Lawrence Mishel’s recent piece on inequality includes a very telling graph: We see that the second half of the 1990s is the first prolonged period when the top 1%’s income soared above that of the...
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Fed talk is anything but cheap
After last Wednesday, I bet Ben Bernanke can relate to this observation by George Carlin about his Catholic upbringing: If you woke up in the morning and said, “I’m going down to 42nd street and commit...
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