Calculated Risk

Eurozone Crisis: In the Eye of the Storm The Eurozone crisis has been in retreat since the introduction of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) three-year long-term refinancing operations (LTROs) in late December 2011. At the European Council Meeting in early March, journalists who cover the crisis fretted that boredom loomed. The current lull does not indicate that the Eurozone is in the clear, but rather it is simply in the eye of the storm, and more drama inevitably awaits.

Copula (statistics) Sklar's Theorem states that any multivariate joint distribution can be written in terms of univariate marginal distribution functions and a copula which describes the dependence structure between the variables. Copulas are popular in high-dimensional statistical applications as they allow one to easily model and estimate the distribution of random vectors by estimating marginals and copulae separately. There are many parametric copula families available, which usually have parameters that control the strength of dependence. Some popular parametric copula models are outlined below.

Susan George (political scientist) Susan George (born June 29, 1934) is a well-known Franco-American political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is a fellow and president of the board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (IBRD) and what she calls their 'maldevelopment model'. Steve Keen's Debtwatch I’ve attended two con­fer­ences in two days where both the power and the impo­tence of the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank (EBC) have been on vivid display. Its polit­i­cal power is con­sid­er­able, both in form and in sub­stance. At both sem­i­nars, the ECB speaker—ECB Board mem­ber Peter Praet at the first, and ECB Pres­i­dent Mario Draghi at the second—spoke first, and then left. In form, the ECB has no need to defend its poli­cies because it is unim­peach­able in its exe­cu­tion of them. In sub­stance, it does not even con­sid­er­ing engag­ing with its subjects—I use the word deliberately—in open and robust discussion. The posi­tion of the econ­omy in the envi­ron­ment is a shared blindspot in eco­nom­ics: no exist­ing school han­dles the topic well, and yet this is the key issue we need to under­stand.

Financial Sector Thinks It’s About Ready To Ruin World Again NEW YORK—Claiming that enough time had surely passed since they last caused a global economic meltdown, top executives from the U.S. financial sector told reporters Monday that they are just about ready to completely destroy the world again. Representatives from all major banking and investment institutions cited recent increases in consumer spending, rebounding home prices, and a stabilizing unemployment rate as confirmation that the time had once again come to inflict another round of catastrophic financial losses on individuals and businesses worldwide. “It’s been about five or six years since we last crippled every major market on the planet, so it seems like the time is right for us to get back out there and start ruining the lives of billions of people again,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “People are beginning to feel at ease spending money and investing in their futures again,” Blankfein continued.

Why Do Banks Get Away With Murder? For five long and very strange years, death haunted tiny Dryden, NY, a town near the Finger Lakes where a plague of car accidents, suicides, and even grisly murders involving two popular cheerleaders just kept mounting up. At the end of Fargo, Frances McDormand’s police chief, Marge Gunderson, captures the psycho played by Peter Stormare. He’s in the backseat of her police cruiser and she talks to him as she drives. We see that she cannot fathom the evil she’s just seen. “And here ya are,” she says, “and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.” Bill Moyers Journal: Bill Moyers talks with Thomas Frank: Web Exclusive But this was the subject of my 2000 book, ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, which discussed NAFTA and the Telecommunications Act at some length. THE WRECKING CREW is an effort to explain the particular species of corruption we see in Washington today. Clinton's contributions here were not insignificant, but they were more passive than active.

Nathan Tankus: Krugman von Hayek By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Fields Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus Mainstream economic discussions employ a false dichotomy. With New Internet and Cell Phone Rules, Federal Communications Commission Approves Mass Sell-off of Public Airwaves This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about media consolidation, I wanted to go to a new issue. As Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal dominated headlines this week, another media story of great significance has been overshadowed: The Federal Communications Commission has approved a set of rules to auction off a sizable chunk of the public airwaves.

Ryan Powers Ryan Powers Posts by Ryan Powers Politics Dr. King’s SCLC moves to oust L.A. chapter president over his support for gay rights. Hard Times for Student Borrowers Kelly Lynch, a former Columbia College Chicago film and video major, is paying educational loan lender Sallie Mae $600 a month, about 1 percent of his total student loan debt of $60,000. Though Lynch, 21, never received his degree from Columbia and barely survives with freelance film and video work, he considers himself lucky. Lynch consolidated his loans through Sallie Mae a few months before the nation’s largest student loan lender suspended its student loan consolidation program in April. The policy shift left many other young borrowers with inflated interest rates.

The Money Party (5): "Us versus Them" M. Collins: The Money Party (5) Michael Collins"Scoop" Independent NewsWashington, D.C. How the GOP Will Benefit From Impending Economic Collapse Republicans benefit from the fact that recessions are class conscious, affecting worse those who can least afford them. An era of highly leveraged US economic expansion and empire is about to come crashing down and swept away. Count on the GOP to make out like bandits. It seems like ages ago, the US was at peace, there was a budget surplus, the economy was growing, and the unemployment rate was very low. But not everyone was happy. There was an entire group of people who harbor not good, but ill will; an entire class wished for bad times and got it.

Inflation is a game of cat and mouse I have been reading David Romer’s class notes called Short-run fluctuations. Part of his paper deals with a model to explain inflation in a liquidity trap. The model is based on real interest rates, output, expected inflation, Keynesian cross and IS-MP model stuff. He writes… “An economy where the nominal interest rate is zero poses severe challenges for policymakers. If output is less than its natural rate, inflation will tend to fall. With the nominal interest rate stuck at zero, this will raise the real interest rate, and so depress the output further.