Totally conventional views which I hold
Most days on MR we try to bring you something new, whether it be a report or an opinion of ours. Even if it is not truly new, perhaps it is at least new relative to the discourse on most other web sites. We are reluctant to recycle old posts, even though I am still thinking about whether a lot of food tastes better when you eat it with your fingers.
But maybe telling you something conventional can be new in a way too. So here are a few totally conventional views which I hold, or still hold, but otherwise don’t bother reporting very often if at all:
1. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush are the most likely candidates to win the GOP nomination.
2. The GOP won’t try to repeal Obamacare, see #Syriza.
2b. Obamacare hasn’t made us healthier (yet?), but it has served as an inefficient form of wealth insurance for some lower-income groups. On net, the negative health consequences of the disemployment effects of the law could easily counterbalance the direct positive health care access effects. Imagine that, a health care reform that doesn’t even boost health. Given their utility functions, many of the law’s backers should be happy with it, but they shouldn’t think I am impressed with their numerous “victory lap” blog posts. Here is my 2009 post on what we should have done instead. I still think that, noting that I remain happy with the cost control parts of what was done.
3. The Supreme Court will rule against the current version of Obamacare and send the matter back to Congress. Confusion will result.
4. During the upward phase of the recovery, monetary policy just doesn’t matter that much.
5. We are still in the great stagnation, for the most part. But with nominal gdp well, well above its pre-crash peak, it is not demand-based “secular stagnation.” It just isn’t, I don’t know how else to put it. And the liquidity trap is still irrelevant and has been since about 2009.
6. There is modest good news on the wage front, but so far it doesn’t amount to a fundamental shift in regime. Following the monthly squiggles doesn’t tell us much. And since wage trouble dates from 1999 and arguably earlier, I don’t attribute much of it to debt overhang from the recession.
7. Edward Snowden is both a hero and a traitor.
8. Syriza still has to try to make a Greek economy work with roughly the same means their predecessors had. I don’t think they can do it, and I am sticking with my recent Grexit prediction, which by the way had an 18-month time horizon on it (see my earlier Twitter response to Felix Salmon).
9. No one knows what to do about ISIS or Putin. The latter is a bigger danger than the former. Confusion will result.
If you’re not excited, fine, that’s the point. The predictable is a kind of news, too. But hold on and come back, because tomorrow you might just hear more about remote-controlled, cyber cockroaches.