2011 - %3, August

GOP Rock: Rick Perry (Drums), Jon Huntsman (Keys), Mitt Romney (Vox), Thad McCotter (Ax)

| Mon Aug. 29, 2011 12:01 AM GMT
Jon Huntsman on the keyboard.

We're still months away from the first meaningful votes in the GOP presidential primary, and a full 14 months away from 2012 election. But it's never too early to start scrutinizing the field. We've written pretty extensively on the various candidates' views on gay marriage, civil liberties, foreign policy, and (most notably) the economy. But in our effort to leave no stone unturned, we got to thinking: Where do the presidential contenders stand on music?

Here's an incomplete guide to their musical careers, their tastes, and the bizarre music they've inspired:

Jon Huntsman, keyboard: When Jon Huntsman was 18 years old, he dropped out of high school to join a prog rock band called Wizard. It was only a matter of time; Politico talked to a former classmate who "recalled the long-haired, diffident Salt Lake City high schooler sitting next to him in history class 'hitting his desk as if it were a piano.'" Now, watching the former Utah governor and US ambassador to China slog through a Republican primary that doesn't seem to have a place for him, you almost get the impression he's secretly plotting to ditch the campaign thing entirely and get the band back together.

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Tinariwen: Music to Cross Deserts By

| Sun Aug. 28, 2011 12:38 PM GMT



Why Do Bankers Hate Inflation?

| Sun Aug. 28, 2011 11:58 AM GMT

David Leonhardt on why the Fed is so hawkish on inflation even though the economy is sluggish and inflationary pressures seem remote:

Why does the Fed skew more hawkish than the economics profession as a whole? Part of the answer lies in the way the 12 voting members of the policy-setting committee are chosen. They are a mix of presidential nominees subject to Senate approval, with 14-year terms, and regional Fed presidents, who are chosen by outside boards that are made up partly of private-sector finance executives.


“The Fed regional banks represent, in essence, the banking community, which tends to be very conservative and hawkish,” Mr. Levey says. “Creditors don’t like inflation — it’s good for debtors.” Indeed, the three recent dissents all came from regional bank presidents: Richard W. Fisher of Dallas, Narayana R. Kocherlakota of Minneapolis and Charles I. Plosser of Philadelphia.

This is obviously the traditional view, and certainly it was true at one time. But is it still true? Or maybe my real question is: should it still be true? Isn't most long-term debt either indexed to inflation in some way (usually via links to LIBOR or treasury spreads or something similar) or else hedged for inflation risks? Shouldn't banks these days actually be fairly indifferent to inflation as long as it stays within a moderate range? There's probably a hole here in my understanding of how finance works, but I don't really get why this creditor/debtor divide on inflation still exists.

Quote of the Day: Who You Calling Right Wing?

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 5:18 PM GMT

The Guardian has a big scoop today:

The bastards! "Recognisably rightwing"! That's going too far. Someday soon there will be a price to be paid for this kind of insolence.

Breezy Talk About Oil

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 3:23 PM GMT

Earlier today, in my post about the economic volatility produced by world demand for oil getting close to the world's supply ceiling, I wrote:

This is not something that can be tamed with gasoline taxes in the United States or anything similar. It’s a global phenomenon. This is all the more reason we should be making Manhattan Project kinds of commitments to developing alternative energy sources and reducing our economy’s dependence on oil. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit in the areas of conservation and increased efficiency, and no reason to waste any more time arguing about. At the very least, we should be doing the easy stuff.

Matt Yglesias replies:

I find this kind of breezy dismissal of higher gasoline taxes to be quite frustrating. For one thing, it’s just not the case that some amazing technological breakthrough is required for people to have less gasoline-intensive lifestyles. The technologies deployed in France—shorter commutes, lighter cars, trains, and buses—don’t require a massive R&D effort to implement....Meanwhile, if Congress were sitting around atop a giant pile of money, I feel certain that they could be relatively easily persuaded to disburse it on a giant alternative energy R&D effort....But how to acquire the giant pile of money? Well, you could tax gasoline.

The bolded sentence in my piece was prompted by a feeling that, in a post yesterday, Matt had breezily dismissed the oil problem as solvable with higher gasoline taxes. So I guess I deserved that.

To be a little clearer, though, the point I was trying to make in bold is that our global oil constraints are driven largely by increasing demand in developing countries, so things like higher American gasoline taxes aren't likely to have a big effect on the broad dynamic caused by bumping up against limited oil supplies. Higher gas taxes would curb demand a bit in the U.S., but developing countries would just suck up the excess and we'd end up right back where we started. Beyond that, however, there's roughly zero difference between Matt and me. It's absolutely true that we could substantially reduce oil use without a technological breakthrough. It's absolutely true that this would insulate us a bit from volatile oil prices. And it's absolutely true that gasoline taxes could be used to fund lots of basic research that might produce a holy energy grail someday.

Still, until we get that technological breakthrough, it's worth keeping in mind that we probably can't insulate ourselves from global oil dynamics more than modestly. The problem is that if the pessimists are right, we're now in an era where oil volatility is going to limit global growth by provoking periodic global recessions. And even if we use less oil, global recessions will still hurt us.

So we need to be more aggressive about building the alternative energy infrastructure we already know about, we need to be more aggressive about looking for new energy sources, and we need to develop these sources aggressively enough that they're cheap enough for the whole world to use. We're still finding significant new oil fields, like the Bakken formation and the recent offshore Brazilian discoveries, but we're finding them in much smaller numbers than in the past — almost certainly too small to make up for declines elsewhere. We don't have all that much time left.

Al-Qaeda #3 Still a Dangerous Job

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 2:22 PM GMT

Remember all those #3 guys in al-Qaeda that we used to kill with such frequency? Well, with Osama bin Laden's death they've moved up to #2, and apparently we're still killing them.

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Five Good Things About a Hurricane

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 2:12 PM GMT

















A Wee Bit More on Oil and the Economy

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 10:15 AM GMT



  3. As prices spike, how does the economy react?











Rikers Island Prisoners Left Behind to Face Irene

| Sat Aug. 27, 2011 9:09 AM GMT
Rikers at night (center).



The Top 5 Longreads of the Week: "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," Clarence Thomas, and ?uestlove

| Fri Aug. 26, 2011 2:35 PM GMT
