“Recent trends in credit default swap markets show a clearly discernable uptick in the perceived likelihood of default on 5-year U.S. senior Treasury debt, a notion that was virtually unthinkable in the past.” Cited in today’s front page New York Times article on the inability of government to address the mounting national debt is research [...]

Let’s start the week with a little severe-economic-downturn-humor, courtesy of Maxine, found via the blog Economists Do It With Models. Think Jay Leno after he’s really given up… More bad-economy Maxine here…

The Real-World Economics Review blog has nominated the following people for its Ignoble Prize for Economics, which will be awarded to three econoists “who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse.” Click on each name to read evidence of their culpability: * Alan Greenspan * Andre Zylberberg * Art Laffer * Assar Lindbeck * [...]

With jokes like “that’s like saying that tautologies are tautological,” not sure you’ll be seeing Yoram Bauman, Ph.D, aka The Stand-Up Economist, on Conan O’Brien (though Jay Leno may be willing to give him a whirl, at this point). In this video, he riffs on Greg Mankiw‘s classic textbook, Principles of Economics.

Quick note related to yesterday’s post about financial savant Norel Roubini’s latest jeremiad on the coming economic poopstorm: Someone at Gawker’s tired of all the negativity, evidenced in this post: Professor Norel Roubini’s Timeline of Terror.

First we read that market savant Norel Roubini thinks the economy is going nowhere fast. Now we see that UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has had a change of heart and pegs the chance of a new Great Depression at 5%. For 2 1/4 years now I have been saying that there is no chance [...]

In the last couple of years, Norel Roubini has become almost a household name (at least if you live with with someone in the financial industry) for his pre-crisis predictions that the U.S. was headed for a financial catastrophe. From Wikipedia: In 2008, Fortune magazine wrote that: “In 2005 Roubini said home prices were riding [...]

…not this year’s Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom. Nor is it Christina Romer, chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, or Laura Tyson, who held that position in the Clinton administration. According to the blog Economic Principals, which used Google Scholar to measure citation counts, the winner is Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland, co-author of This Time is Different:Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

Economist Mark Thoma posted this graph on his blog Economist’s View. Fellow economist Brad DeLong comments: “It’s very scary: long-term unemployment has a way of turning into structural unemployment…”

“Demand, Supply“ At first blush, you might think that Principles of Economics, written by Harvard professor and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Greg Mankiw, doesn’t necessarily seem like ripe material for a rap adaptation. But if you did think that, you’d be wrong. Listen to “Demand, Supply”, by Rhythm, Rhyme, Results. The [...]