The tragedy of mathematical education

Here
You see the fruits of the problem when you teach students material that uses math to solve problems and express ideas. They freeze up and want recipes rather than seeing beneath the surface to the ideas.
But to be fair, some people only get the ideas by working through the recipes. I never [...]

This seems like another alternative to a credit card option to me

Is This The Beginning of the End of Free Checking? – Real Time Economics – WSJ
You pay $20 per month to the bank for the checking account, but the account does not charge any overdraft fees for overdrafts up to $500.  And you get a debit card.
You therefore pay $20 per month for the ability [...]

‘Crowding out’

is the idea that people offset increased government spending by increasing private savings.  It is happening, at least partially:
Americans are saving more money – Top Stocks Blog – MSN Money

Much of the time when I read something

in the newspaper related to what I work on, I realize that when reporters try to explain the facts, they get it wrong, or at least explain it wrong, since they stop a few steps before the correct explanation-probably looking for the ‘bad guy versus good guy’ explanation, rather than a consistent and coherent explanation.
The [...]

I loved the kindle,

and now it is dead.
And no way to repair it–either buy a new one, or pay $180.00 for a refurb.  I am sad and annoyed.

In the summer, I went to a talk by regulators,

who argued that a big problem they had was that financial institutions did not want to borrow money because of ’stigma,’ which ended up making the liquidity problems worse.  So the regulators wanted to take away that stigma.
Fast forward to fall 2008, in which the government has ’solved’ the stigma problem by making the deals [...]

The more I think of it,

the more that I think that this financial bailout is a giant scam.  Follow Bagehot’s rule: Lend freely at a penalty rate if you think that the assets are good.
But that’s what they tried with AIG. Didn’t work, because good assets can become bad assets before the crisis ends.  After all, the Fed was telling [...]

Even the ones for the bankers forced by Paulson to take the TARP money?

What Congress Can Do To Stop The AIG Bonuses – The Atlantic Politics Channel
That’s one way to get the banks to pay back.  It’s also another way to move people from banks to hedge funds. 
Oh boy the hedge fund guys must be happy.  The survivors are going to be really rich, because they are [...]

Awesome

Falkenblog: Economists Aren’t More Stupid than Other Scientists
Alas, I don’t know enough physics to judge this.  Perhaps all those ex-physicists and mathematician types who actually run the complicated derivatives models will comment.
The economists’ asteroids are realizations of mean zero random variables…fashionably now with power-law tails.

Economist as charlatan

Listening to Paul Krugman on tv telling us that ‘for sure Japan’s government spending during the lost decade saved them from a great depression.’
There is no way he knows that.  No one knows that.