From the Real-World Economics Review Blog, a timeline of warnings and events going back to 1995 and leading up to the financial crisis of the last few years. Some early warnings from various economists: Sept, 2001 “the new housing boom is another rapidly inflating asset bubble financed by the same loose money practices that fuelled [...]

Economist Jeff Frankel, who is a member of the committee that officially calls the beginning and end of recessions, says last week’s announcement that the economy added jobs in March has put a nail in the coffin of the Great Recession. But economist Mark Thoma is more cautious. First, Frankel: Job market confirms end of [...]

University of Michigan economist and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Mark J. Perry writes on his blog “Carpe Diem” that things really aren’t so bad. Median priced existing single-family home in the Midwest (January 2010): $127,200 Monthly payment with 20% down payment and 5.1% mortgage: $553 Qualifying annual income required to buy a $127,200 home: [...]

“In fact, I believe that the elites have so mistreated the American people that we should declare that a state of war exists between America and Washington.” Former Federal Reserve economist and economics professor Arnold Kling doesn’t like the new health care law. From The Daily Caller: Health care bill woke a sleeping giant For [...]

There are death panels, communist takeovers, and the end of liberty as we know it, and then there are more rational criticisms of the health care bill. Greg Mankiw, former chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, offers this post: Healthcare, Trade Offs, and the Road Ahead One thing I have been struck [...]

From the Library of Economics and Liberty, libertarian Bryan Caplan, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, offers 15 books that influenced his thinking: 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While I ultimately didn’t learn much of substance, this book got me very excited about about ideas. [...]

From The Journal of Private Enterprise, an extract from the paper “Homer Economicus: Using The Simpsons to Teach Economics.” Bureaucrats and bureaucracy As Gwartney, Stroup, Sobel and Macpherson (2003, 135) state, “Economic analysis suggests a strong tendency for bureaucrats and public-sector employees to favor expanding their budgets beyond what would be considered economically efficient.” The [...]

Some of you have no doubt seen the “Fear the Boom and Bust” video featuring the rap stylings of economists John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek, two economists with diametrically opposed viewpoints. To put the dispute in its most simplistic terms, Keynes thought government intervention was the only way out of economic downturns, and Hayek…not so much. (Think Paul Krugman vs. Ron Paul to get a picture of two contemporary acolytes of these schools of thought.)

In Wikipedia’s entry on Keynes, the section “Economics: out of favour 1979–2007” is followed by Economics: the Keynesian resurgence of 2008–2009.

From a recent post titled “What Are These Three Numbers” on the economics blog Econbrowser comes this chart:

These numbers, represented in billions of 2010 dollars, were taken from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

Speaking of the U.S. debt, as we did in our last post — Keith Hennessy, who was a senior White House economic advisor to President George W. Bush, wrote a lengthy post on his blog a couple of weeks ago criticizing President Obama’s description of the Bush years as a “decade of profligacy.” One argument, [...]