What we’re reading (10/12)
“JPMorgan's Dimon Blasts Bitcoin As ‘Worthless’, Due For Regulation” (Reuters). “‘No matter what anyone thinks about it, government is going to regulate it. They are going to regulate it for (anti-money laundering) purposes, for (Bank Secrecy Act) purposes, for tax,’ Dimon said, referring to banking regulations in a conversation held virtually by the Institute of International Finance.”
“Thorstein Veblen’s Theory Of The Leisure Class—A Status Update” (Quillette). “In the past, people displayed their membership of the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more affordable than before. And people are less likely to receive validation for the material items they display. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs. “
“The Eviction Tsunami That Wasn't” (Reason). “When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in late August, housing activists, researchers, and politicians warned that an eviction tsunami would be the inevitable result…[e]conomic projections of how many evictions could be expected without a national moratorium painted an equally dire picture…Nevertheless, a month after the end of the federal eviction moratorium, these millions of evictions have yet to materialize. Indeed, while filings have increased, they remain well below historical averages almost everywhere in the country.”
“The Trillion-Dollar Coin Scheme, Explained By The Guy Who Invented It” (Vox). “In 2013, even former US Mint Director Philip Diehl agreed it would work, and over the years, influential voices like financial journalist Joe Weisenthal and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have also promoted the idea. But all these people did not simply stumble upon this law. It was brought to their attention by Beowulf, a blog commenter and ‘reply guy’ better known as Atlanta-area attorney Carlos Mucha. Mucha conceived of the idea in a short comment on financier Warren Mosler’s blog posted on May 24, 2010, at 8:29 pm[.]”
“The Nobel Prize In Economics Celebrates An Empirical Revolution” (The Economist). “[T]heory [once] ruled the roost and empirical work was a poor second cousin. ‘Hardly anyone takes data analysis seriously,’ declared Edward Leamer of the University of California, Los Angeles, in a paper published in 1983. Yet within a decade, new and innovative work had altered the course of the profession, to such an extent that the lion’s share of notable new research today is empirical. For helping enable this transition David Card of the University of California at Berkeley shares this year’s economics Nobel prize, awarded on October 11th, with Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens of Stanford University.”
