How Not to Fix Economic Models

Add more money. The Wall Street Journal notes the Institute for New Economic Thinking was launched last year with $50 million from financier...

VXX Risk Premium?

The VIX is calculated and disseminated in real-time by the Chicago Board Options Exchange. It is a weighted blend of prices for a range of o...

Michiko Kakutani's Top Ten

Super Reviewer Michiko Kakutani has one economics book in her ' top ten' list for 2010 , and it's Nouriel Roubini's book Cri...

Fairy Tales And Reality

I took my 3 year-old princess to see Tangled , Disney's latest movie about Rapunzel, a princess who goes through some adventures and the...

Why the Equity Premium Isn't A Risk Premium

As I've said, there's a new consensus forming that while risk premia do not exist within asset classes they do exist across assets, ...

Me on Risk, Return, and Alpha

This was filmed while I was in Rotterdam in between krokets . My argument is that risk premiums do not exist within almost all asset classe...

The McGurk Effect

I was reading and watching some of Jonah Lehrer's oeuvre , and found him a bright, engaging speaker in the mold of Malcom Gladwell. He ...

GM Zombie Reanimated

GM supposedly sold stock today that implies a current p/e around 6.2 (earnings around $8B, market cap around $50B), compared to Ford at 8.3....

Redistribution's Assumptions

In the WSJ Jonah Lehrer discusses a bizarre 'behavioral economics' type experiment that to him suggests people like taxes: The study...

Robert Frank Wrong on Curing Inequality

Russ Roberts interviewed Robert Frank over at Econ Talk. Frank has written often on inequality, and how people are motivated as much by envy...

Amazing Guess, Great Models, Similarly Inspired

In the most stunning solution of a "Wheel of Fortune" puzzle ever, a Manhattan editor Caitlin Burke nailed a staggeringly long a...

The Liberal Mind in a Nutshell

Joshua Cohen is a well respected academic, but his instincts are hardly distinguishable from the average rube who thinks in Marxist terms. ...

An Unappreciated Component of Nazi Productivity

One supposed silver lining of totalitarianism is that they make the trains run on time. That is, they are efficient. As Galbraith used to ...

High Volatility Anomaly Needs More than Lottery Preferences

Last week I noted there are several reasons why people over invest in high volatility stocks: overconfidence, investors chasing extreme perf...

Tom Sargent on Macro: All's Well

Macro modeling godfather Tom Sargent was interviewed by the Minneapolis Fed. When asked about the problems of Macro, he instantly offered ...

Book Review: All the Devils are Here

I got a copy of the latest big book on the crisis: All the Devil's are Here , by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. The bottom line: this ...

Me on StockTwits.TV

Tadas Viskanta runs a blog called Abnormal Returns , and he interviewed me on his show . The video is within a site called StockTwits , wh...

Krugman Doesn't Care about Process

At Obama's press conference, Obama used 'I' instead of 'we' a lot. As part of a narcissistic profession his narcissism ...

Bernanke Panics

Here's big Ben at a conference to Honor Milton Friedman in 2002: For practical central bankers, among which I now count myself, Friedma...

Why are High Risk Stocks so Crappy?

The key to the dominance of low volatility equities is that high volatility stocks are bad investments on the two main dimensions of stockwo...