links for 2009-11-03

• Making Light: "He used...sarcasm. He knew all the tricks."
• Making Light: And furthermore, the Anaconda Plan didn't actually take place on the Snake River
• sans everything
• John Berry: Don’t worry about the weak dollar
• Letters to Our Daughters Project : On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess
• All-University of California Group in Economic History
• David Weigel: NY-23: Scozzafava Robocalls for Owens
• Sam Stein: Jon Krakauer: McChrystal's Explanation For Pat Tillman Cover-up Is "Preposterous"
• James Kwak: Note to Congress: You Are Not the People You Serve
  From a Washington Post article on proposed legislation to regulate overdraft fees: “Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) said he avoided overdraft fees with a credit line and asked if many of the problems could be eased with consumer education.” Good on you, Spencer. You have a credit line — which many of your constituents can’t get — and you have it linked to your checking account — which many of your constituents wouldn’t even know how to ask for.
• Paul Krugman: Fiscal Stimulus: Too Little of a Good Thing
• Martin Wolf: Fed’s Secret Wall St Bailout Going Strong
  By lending the banks money at zero interest rates, the FT’s Martin Wolf says, the Fed is helping the banks recapitalize themselves. The banks aren’t lending because they’re still trying to recover from all the lousy loans they made three years ago (and because there aren’t all that many folks to lend to). So there’s nothing else to do with the money other than hoard it, buy safe Treasuries, and pay huge bonuses. It’s annoying to watch banks that would have collapsed a year ago now minting money at taxpayer expense. But that’s the way monetary stimulus always works.
• William Sterling: Looking Back at Lehman: An Empirical Analysis of the Financial Shock and the Effectiveness of Countermeasures
• Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef: Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006
  We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. For the recent period we estimate that rents accounted for 30% to 50% of the wage differential between the financial sector and the rest of the private sector.
• Bruce Bartlett: The Supply-Side Pariah Returns
• Martin Wolf: How mistaken ideas helped to bring the economy down
• Simon Gilchrist, Vladimir Yankov, and Egon Zakrajsek: Credit Market Shocks and Economic Fluctuations: Evidence from Corporate Bond and Stock Markets (April 7, 2009)
• Simon Gilchrist and Egon Zakrajsek: Linkages Between the Financial and Real Sectors: An Overview (September 24, 2008)
• David Cay Johnston: Patches, Portability, and Punting Versus an Estate Tax KISS
• Background for Berkeley Political Economy Group Major Advisory Committee and Stakeholders' Meeting
• IASTP - International and Area Studies Teaching Program - UC Berkeley
• Linda Hirshman: How the GOP Loses Women
  Dede Scozzafava’s exit from a New York House race is just the latest example of the new Republican Party’s hostility to pro-choice women. Linda Hirshman on why Sarah Palin is a club of one.
• David Roberts: The real reason the climate bill is going to suck
• Belle Sawhill and Ron Haskins: Five Myths About Our Land of Opportunity - Brookings Institution
• Berkeley Ph.D. Candidates in 2009-2010
• Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz: A Monetary History of the United States
• Justin Martyr: The Faith Heuristic: The Caplan-Hanson Debate
  I've always assumed, wrongly it appears, that [libertarians] would argue that the slaves could never be the least cost avoider. But I stand corrected. I learned in the debate that they would bite the bullet and accept slavery and genocide...