U.S. Politics: Hairpiece In the Middle East Part 2

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 Get it? Part? See what I did there?

[Kalbear]

Quote

Also, if the next thread title is not "Mueller....Mueller....Muelller" I'm going to be very disappointed in all of you. 

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

It's a great title, but is it as topical? Mueller's investigation should be ramping up right about the time Trumpy the clown gets back from his tour. That will be the right time to go all Ben Stein. 

[Kalbear]

Just now, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

It's a great title, but is it as topical? Mueller's investigation should be ramping up right about the time Trumpy the clown gets back from his tour. That will be the right time to go all Ben Stein. 

 

Just now, Kalbear said:

Also, if the next thread title is not "Mueller....Mueller....Muelller" I'm going to be very disappointed in all of you. 

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 ^^^^^

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/110/587/male-offspring-of-mine-i-am-saddened-over-the-previous-action.jpg

[Kalbear]

So in actual news, Trump told Rivlin (an Israeli official) that he just got back from the Middle East. That's awesome.

Ivanka gave a speech to Saudi Arabia about women empowerment where all women reporters were banned.

Oh, and this happened - Trump revealed that the secret intel he told the Russians came from Israel but he never told anyone that.

Quote

 

JERUSALEM — President Trump said Monday that he never told Russian diplomats during a May 10 Oval Office meeting that the classified information about the Islamic State he was sharing with them had come from Israel.

Trump veered off the script of his heavily choreographed visit to Israel during a brief media appearance alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Both men responded to a shouted question about Trump sharing Israeli intelligence during his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“Just so you understand, I never mentioned the word or the name Israel,” Trump told reporters. “Never mentioned it during that conversation. They're all saying I did, so you have another story wrong. Never mentioned the word Israel.”

 

 

[Mexal]

It's too bad you can't remove a President's security clearance.

[aceluby]

14 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

So in actual news, Trump told Rivlin (an Israeli official) that he just got back from the Middle East. That's awesome.

Ivanka gave a speech to Saudi Arabia about women empowerment where all women reporters were banned.

Oh, and this happened - Trump revealed that the secret intel he told the Russians came from Israel but he never told anyone that.

 

JFC, he's such an imbecile.

Yesterday I heard on NPR from one of his big Muslim supporters in the states about how genius he is and he's on pace to broker peace for the entire world.  She seemed smart, and yet I just couldn't understand how she was coming to her conclusions at all.

[Zorral]

Weep, weep, weep.  The doom promised has engulfed <sic - sick> the entire planet.  Ride to ruin and world's ending ye born into the apocalypse.

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

42 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

It's a great title, but is it as topical? Mueller's investigation should be ramping up right about the time Trumpy the clown gets back from his tour. That will be the right time to go all Ben Stein. 

Not really. The investigation will be slowed down by the addition of a Special Counselor, especially one as detailed oriented as Mueller. 

What will get ramped up when Trump gets back is the public spectacle that is the Comey hearing. 

[Mexal]

7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Not really. The investigation will be slowed down by the addition of a Special Counselor, especially one as detailed oriented as Mueller. 

What will get ramped up when Trump gets back is the public spectacle that is the Comey hearing. 

If Mueller doesn't shut it down.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Not really. The investigation will be slowed down by the addition of a Special Counselor, especially one as detailed oriented as Mueller. 

What will get ramped up when Trump gets back is the public spectacle that is the Comey hearing. 

All the more reason to center on Lil' Donny's Adventures in the Middle East, no? Today he got to wear a yarmulke and touch the Western Wall!

[Kalbear]

And get his hand slapped away by Melania.

 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

2 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

And get his hand slapped away by Melania.

 

Ouch. Nothing worse than traveling with an irate spouse. Looks like it's going to be a long week for Donny.

[Mexal]

5 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

And get his hand slapped away by Melania.

 

I bet they get immediately divorced when he leaves office.

[Fragile Bird]

13 minutes ago, Mexal said:

I bet they get immediately divorced when he leaves office.

Being such a trailblazer, he'll divorce her while in office.

[drawkcabi]

17 minutes ago, Mexal said:

I bet they get immediately divorced when he leaves office.

So he'll divorce her this year?

[OldGimletEye]

More on supply side fu:

https://www.ft.com/content/a4e01ef4-3c8d-11e7-821a-6027b8a20f23

I'd quote but evidently ft doesn't like that.

Anyway,

I’m startin to suspect that where we may ultimately arrive at on taxes, particularly on corporate taxes and on income taxes for top incomes, may depend on the state of other laws and institutions. If conservative sorts of people want lower taxes, then maybe they should:

1. Stop pissing on unions every chance they get.

2. Stop trying to sell econ 101 stories about minimum wage laws

3. Stop fighting us on full employment policies.

Now if conservative sorts of people don’t want to play ball here, then ya maybe we need to just jack up taxes a bit more in response to worker bargaining power being weak.

Moving on:

Yes that RBC model you're sportin’ is full of leaks. About as leaky as that primered bondo-ed out 1975 Chevy Nova you were driving around in high school.

Interesting stuff here:

:

Quote

In an economy lacking the full set of forward and state contingent markets describing the ADM model, intertemporal equilibrium cannot predetermined before trading even begins, but must, if such an equilibrium obtains, unfold through the passage of time. Outcomes might be expected, but they would not be predetermined in advance. Echoing Hayek, though to my knowledge he does not refer to Hayek in his work, Radner describes his intertemporal equilibrium under uncertainty as an equilibrium of plans, prices, and price expectations. Even if it exists, the Radner equilibrium is not the same as the ADM equilibrium, because without a full set of markets, agents can’t fully hedge against, or insure, all the risks to which they are exposed. The distinction between ex ante and ex post is not eliminated in the Radner equilibrium, though it is eliminated in the ADM equilibrium. 

Now I want to add some here. And the point here is not to talk about duck tape engineering,an interesting subject, in its own right, of course, but neither here nor there at the moment.

I get this theoretical stuff is boring as hell, but its important to a number of policy issues conservative sorts of people.

Stuff like:

1. Why it’s not the case that raising the minimum wage will result in unemployment or losses in output. And yes conservative sorts of people, this is assuming no monopsony power is in play on labor markets.

2. Why strengthening worker bargaining power not need result in losses of output.

3. Why expansionary monetary policy doesn’t result in wage gains being offset by inflation.

4. How we think about unemployment benefits. So we can be a bit skeptical when conservative clown man runs around saying unemployment benefits are the cause of a deep recession and unemployment.

Anyway,

The Walrasianism of the RBC model maybe not be obvious, but it happens somewhere right around after solving the consumers maximization problem and the firm’s maximization problem, log linearizing the solutions and then setting y = c or something like that, and going on your merry way.

Now the New Keynesian model is an improvement over the RBC model, but the Calvo Fairy is akin to duct tape engineering, in my opinion. And if there is one thing an old hillbilly knows about, it’s puttin duck tape on shit that doesn't work too well, to make it work better, or to at least make it serviceable.

The Calvo Fairy basically says, at any given period of time, only a fraction of firm’s are able to change their prices to their optimal price, the optimal price being the firm,s discounted marginal cost over an infinite horizon plus a markup . While the Calvo Fairy models price stickness, which is needed to make any model realistic, it doesn’t in my opinion really tell us what is really going on or why.

In fact, I’ll just say that conservative sorts of people aren’t the only ones that get a hankerin to fire up the eight track, dust off the Starsky & Hutch collection, and puttin’ on their best leisure suit and start reliving the 1970s.

Though conservative sorts of person’s reasons for wanting to relive the 1970s is a bit different than my own. For the conservative sort of person the reason is: “Rampant inflation is just around the corner, like back in the 1970s”. And maybe cause that early 1980s glory is comin around real soon.

My own reason is that back in the 1970s equilibrium macro was a thing, which generally tried to show that quantity adjustments mattered in an explicit manner. Unfortunately, the disequilibrium macro kind of went the way of disco. I think that was a bit unfortunate.

To the conservative sort of person, the representative firm’s maximization problem looks something like:

max py(w) – wl

 

More realistically it looks something like:

max py(w) – wl

y(w) < Q(e)

In short, the firm maximizes against a perceived quantity constraint. If the constraint binds, after applying Kuhn Tucker conditions and all that shit, the firms output is demand determined. And it also means, conservative sorts of people, that firm’s marginal product is greater than the wage. The upshot of this is that wages can rise, to some extent, without damaging output. In fact in some cases wages can rise and increase output when the constraint binds.

And I say, the firm often operates against perceived quantity constraints because in reality it has no idea what kind of demand curve it’s facing and probably doesn’t even really know what it’s own supply curve actually looks like. Instead, it sells stuff, and then updates how much stuff it can sell, ie what kind of perceive quantity constraint it has, then eventually updating its prices as its marginal cost rise. Holding technology, preferences, labor, and capital constant, equilibrium is something the system tends to, not where it is at.

And there sure in the hell isn’t some mythical auctioneer spitting out a vector of prices once he receives information about the excess demands on each market. So when people are giving you predictions based on that RBC model they are sportin be very leery.

Be very leery indeed.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

24 minutes ago, drawkcabi said:

So he'll divorce her this year?

Not a chance.  She probably gets a better deal as a widow (which she is counting on), and I don't know that he really cares about stuff like that.  She is otherwise incredibly loyal to him in places that he does care about.  We have to stop projecting our own feelings on to her. 

[Guy Kilmore]

6 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Not a chance.  She probably gets a better deal as a widow (which she is counting on), and I don't know that he really cares about stuff like that.  She is otherwise incredibly loyal to him in places that he does care about.  We have to stop projecting our own feelings on to her. 

I agree.  This kind of stuff probably has been going on for a long time, we are just getting to see it now.