Stan Collender's blog
Ben Bernanke may have painted a big bullseye on the Federal Reserve when he spoke last week in Jackson, Wyoming, about the Fed providing additional stimulus if the economy needs it.
There's no quicker way to get long-time federal budget watchers to curl up in a fetal position and rock back and forth while moaning in pain than to mention three words: general revenue sharing. Yet Robert Shiller not only used that phrase this morning in this excellent piece in The New York Times, he recommended that the program be brought back to life as a way to help state and local governments out of their fiscal problems and, therefore, to help fix the U.S. economy.
Some background for those too young to remember or for who the original experience is still too painful to recall voluntarily.
Long-time CG&G readers know that my Beautiful and Talented Wife (The BTW) is a professional actor. What you don’t know is that one of The BTW’s favorite and most celebrated roles was when she played Sarah Daniels, the lead in Rebecca Gilman’s wonderful, and wonderfully controversial, play, Spinning Into Butter.
The phrase “Spinning Into Butter” comes from the now largely discredited children’s story Little Black Sambo. In that book, Sambo gives his clothes, shoes, and umbrella to four tigers so they won’t eat him. But instead on agreeing among themselves on how to divide up what Sambo gives them, the tigers chase each other around a tree so fast as they argue that they spin themselves into butter.
Matt Miller's column in today's The Washington Post has to make you ask, "What about the budget?" After two years of demands, recriminations, and demagoguery galore about the budget deficit, national debt, and fiscal policy in general, won't dramatic political changes like the ones pollsters are predicting will happen in this election inevitably lead to massive changes in what the federal government spends and taxes?
Not a chance.
Assuming there are no big changes between now and election day (that is over just 10 more weeks), Republicans either will have narrow majorities in one or both houses of Congress or the Democrats will have smaller majorities in the House and Senate than they have now. In general, that's not a situation conducive to compromises, cooperation, and large changes.
The answer to the question I posed below...Who did the voiceover for the Golden Dollar commercial featured in yesterday's post on dollar coins?...was Michael Keaton. Alex Baldwin had agreed to do it but ended up not being able to do so and Keaton was recruited. Keaton was in a studio in LA while the ad agency directed him from the East Coast. He did several television and radio commercials at the same time. If I remember correctly, Bob Giraldi, who is best known for directing Michael Jackson's video "Beat It," directed this commercial for the Mint.
"Larry"...You were the first commenter with the correct answer so please send your full name and mailing address to stan@capitalgainsandgames.com and the dollar coin will be on its way.
Thank you all for playing.
This op-ed from Friday's The Washington Post about the failure of the current version of the dollar coin to become a circulating coin brought back lots of memories.
In 1999 and 2000, I headed the team that was hired by the U.S. Mint to increase consumer awareness of the new "Golden Dollar" coin. The was the coin with Sacagawea and her child that replaced the much-reviled Susan B. Anthony dollar. Thanks to it's color and design, not to mention an aggressive (and eventually award-winning) marketing campaign, the Golden Dollar was embraced by consumers. Within 3 months consumer awareness -- which was all we were hired to do -- was at 85 percent and people were lining up for hours outside Wal-Mart stores to get them.
According to this story by Floyd Norris in today's New York Times...
...domestic investors purchased more Treasuries than did overseas ones — including foreign governments — in 2009 and again in the first half of this year. Those purchases came as government borrowing rose to pay for bailouts and recession-related spending.
Several weeks ago Paul Krugman said in his blog that he wished he had written one of my columns. Today I want to reciprocate in kind: I truly wish I had written this from a few days ago. Paul's money quote:
So how do austerians deal with the reality of interest rates that are plunging, not soaring? The latest fashion is to declare that there’s a bubble in the bond market: investors aren’t really concerned about economic weakness; they’re just getting carried away. It’s hard to convey the sheer audacity of this argument: first we were told that we must ignore economic fundamentals and instead obey the dictates of financial markets; now we’re being told to ignore what those markets are actually saying because they’re confused.
I took some grief (and some praise) for two posts (here and here) from a week or so ago that said the bond market was unambiguously signaling that the current economic situation warranted deficit increases rather than reductions and that it had no problem with that. Now Floyd Norris at the New York Times has come to the same conclusion as I did. The money quote:
But for now, the financial markets seem to fear recession and deflation much more than they fear deficit spending.
