investing
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Federal spending, quick!
Paul Krugman was my favorite New York Times columnist even before he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics this week. His column on Friday lined right up with my current obsession: federal stimulus spending, quick, lots of it. He writes: “Right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about […]
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Green infrastructure spending is a win x 4
I’ve been inveighing for weeks that greens need to get involved in the coming battle over fiscal policy — to argue that the economic crisis militates for big, immediate (green!) public spending rather than the belt-tightening Beltway pundits reflexively demand from candidates. As I’ve been documenting, it seems elite opinion is generally swinging in the […]
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Economists weigh in on the need for stimulus spending
The New York Times has a heartening story saying that the need for stimulus spending is widely accepted: But the extra spending, a sore point in normal times, has been widely accepted on both sides of the political aisle as necessary to salvage the banking system and avert another Great Depression. “Right now would not […]
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Concord vs. Keynes in the nation’s editorial pages
Ruth Marcus gets it wrong: [The economic crisis] could give the next president more maneuvering room to extricate himself from unaffordable campaign promises and to build political consensus for painful but necessary budgetary choices. Nobel economics prize winner Paul Krugman gets it right: And this is also a good time to engage in some serious […]
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Deregulation and inequality are bad for both the economy and the environment
Now that financial apocalypse has been (possibly) delayed a few weeks, let’s focus on the mortgage crisis and see what it teaches us about financial regulations in general. Mortgages once were great investments. When lenders were highly regulated and careful never to lend more than the underlying value of homes, mortgages provided a higher return […]
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Lawmakers use financial crisis as pretext to screw with climate legislation
In a post yesterday I drew attention to an emerging battle over macroeconomics. To put it crudely: does the financial crisis mean the next president will need to trim his ambitions and focus on reducing the deficit? Or does it call for substantial public spending to get the economy moving again (deficit be damned, at […]
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The financial crisis could open up new opportunities for sustainability thinking
It’s official: we haven’t had a financial crisis like this since at least 1603, and commentators here in the U.K. seem to agree that things can never be the same again. Capitalism, if not in question, will be a very different beast from now on. Think donkey on short leash. It’s all a bit frightening, […]
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The cheapest sources of new electricity are also the cleanest
This slide comes from a recent powerpoint presentation by FERC Commissioner Jon Wellinghoff — hardly what you’d call a green radical (click for a larger version): Note that the cheapest sources of new delivered electricity are also the cleanest. Happy news, right?
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Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 7
No, 450 is not politically possible today. Nor is 550. Nor is action sufficient to stave off 1,000 ppm and 6°C warming. OK, that was clear before because congressional conservatives can certainly block the necessary action and demagogue the energy price issue — and they obviously intend to. But I think the financial bailout bill […]