1. Jeff Frankel's vision of fiscal responsibility.
2. Sumner on Selgin; Scott remains one of the best arguments for the blogosphere.
3. Why was the Canadian housing market different?
4. "We found that negative emotions play a key role in how much we enjoy sports."
5. Dubai photo show; use "Full Screen" mode.
6. Uh-oh.
(4) must rank among the least surprising scientific findings ever. Have these researchers ever seen a sports movie?
The author of the Canadian vs. U.S. housing market didn’t mention that U.S. monetary policy was even looser vis-a-vis Canada’s than suggested by the graph of the interest rates, because productivity in the U.S. economy was higher than in Canada’s (cue Canada’s Single Payer health system and it’s deadening effect on innovation in medicine). Higher productivity calls for a tighter monetary policy.
This explains why “4th and 26″ is my favorite Eagles game of all time. I was certain that the Eagles were doomed about 10 different times, only to have them rise from the dead time and again, culminating with the impossible 4th and 26 conversion that lead to the tying field goal.
Anne, I cannot believe there is actually someone out there worse than Ben “Couldn’t predict the past” Bernanke.
Interesting photos of Dubai. The dichotomy between pictures 9 and 10 could not have been coincidental. I wonder if the person responsible for it was more interested in contrasting the race of the subjects or the class? Or perhaps both. Most of the discussion centering around Dubai’s potential implosion seems to be focused on how it affects the living standards of it’s affluent Western expats. I wonder what will become of the millions of South Asian labourers that have built the city now that their utility is at an end. I am skeptical that their home countries could absorb such a rapid inflow of surplus labor and a decline in repatriated earnings without significant pains.
The piece on Canada also doesn’t discuss anything about land and building regulation.
All of the US has the mortgage deduction, but certain parts of the US– including booming places like Texas– have housing markets that look more like Canada.
And quite a few European countries had housing bubbles but no mortgage deduction.
It is possible that Canada’s bubble is just popping later, too.
Still, it’s worth study. Different states and countries had different housing markets, while some European countries had identical experiences to our worst-off states.
(4) must rank among the least surprising scientific findings ever. Have these researchers ever seen a sports movie?
Indeed. Or any other kind of movie or play?
“Boy meets girl. Boy and girl marry and are happy,” is rarely the plot outline of a successful movie.
I guess I’m missing why Sumner is such a favorite here. Is it is substance or his style? He’s certainly thorough and detailed, but his China/U.S./India PPP GDP piece linked here a few weeks ago was, for me, one of those eye-opening moments when you realize someone may not quite have both feet planted. (Unless, of course, that post was a massive troll.)
Its not the appreciation of home prices in US and Canada that the graph shows; its also the decline in the value of the dollar. If that were accounted for, US prices would seem even more unstable compared to Canada.
The Canadian dollar was worth 69 cents at the beginning of 2000 and fell to a low of 62 cents in January 2002; today it’s worth 95 cents. So in US dollar terms, the price appreciation has been even sharper.
Some have argued that the CMHC is blowing a bubble in the Canadian market due to a recent loosening of lending standards. See for instance here and here.
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