links for 2009-11-20
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This is truly amazing. It’s one thing to be intimidated by bond market vigilantes. It’s another to be intimidated by the fear that bond market vigilantes might show up one of these days, even though you’re currently able to sell long-term bonds at an interest rate of less than 3.5%. Yet that, according to rumors, is what’s happening...
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Of the history, the first half of the book is Bartlett at the top of his form. It is an able, even elegant, exposition of Keynesianism, its rise and fall. His core assertion is not exactly new: that Keynes was a conservative who wanted to refine capitalism in order to save it. This should be familiar to anyone except the raving ideologues (and perhaps to some of them). But in presenting the point, Bartlett offers the best brief, non-technical account of Keynes' program that I've ever seen. His analytical clarity also allows him to present a compelling account of where and how Keynesianism went off the tracks. Most of its defenders in the Democratic party had abandoned it by the beginning of the Reagan years, leaving them pretty much unarmed in the ideological wars (Bartlett says they embraced the cause of "industrial policy," but I think the embrace was pretty tepid). But now, the 50-page heart of the book: an account and defense of supply-side economics. It--the account--is a mess. I
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The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 9.64 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the third quarter of 2009, up 40 basis points from the second quarter of 2009, and up 265 basis points from one year ago, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) National Delinquency Survey. The non-seasonally adjusted delinquency rate increased 108 basis points from 8.86 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to 9.94 percent this quarter. The delinquency rate breaks the record set last quarter. The records are based on MBA data dating back to 1972. The delinquency rate includes loans that are at least one payment past due but does not include loans somewhere in the process of foreclosure. The percentage of loans in the foreclosure process at the end of the third quarter was 4.47 percent, an increase of 17 basis points from the second quarter of 2009 and 150 basis points from one
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Growth in the world’s industrialised economies has resumed after the most virulent recession for decades, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said on Thursday. But it warns that unemployment is set to continue to rise well into 2010 and to fall only modestly the following year from a peak of over 9 per cent.
