Word: economisters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that will have to bear the risk of hikes in health-care costs. The UAW will have to face the same hard choices the automakers do: balancing rising expenses with limited funds and a promise to cover everyone. "They cannot control it. They can't," says Uwe Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton University and an expert on health policy. "The union will just lose that deal." And before long, he says, the UAW will find itself having to limit choices, reduce costs and ask members to contribute money to keep the plan afloat--the same cuts proposed by carmakers that...
...results will not be pretty. "Look what happened in New Jersey," says Stuart Altman, an economist and professor of national health policy at Brandeis and a longtime policy adviser on health care. The state recently revealed that it faces a $58 billion shortfall in funding for retiree health care, even larger than GM's. To meet that gap, New Jersey has asked retirees to pay more in premiums, but the state may eventually have to scale back spending on services like public colleges and mass transportation. Some cities, such as New York and Duluth, Minn., have already set up health...
...keep inflation from getting out of hand. The Fed has failed miserably at each of these tasks once--depression prevention in the early 1930s and inflation prevention in the 1970s. Under Greenspan, it took care of both pretty well. Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, an economist with no particular loyalty to the former maestro, estimates that of 36 significant interest-rate decisions during Greenspan's 18-year tenure, the chairman got 35 right. (The exception? DeLong thinks the Fed should have cut rates in late...
...nature of real estate that the crumbling may continue for a while yet. "It's way too premature to be talking about light at the end of the tunnel--it's still pitch black," says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, a research firm. Shepherdson, not a congenitally bearish sort, was one of several prominent forecasters who began warning of housing troubles in 2005. Now he sees huge quantities of unsold inventory, which will lead to more cutbacks in construction, which will lead to more job losses and so on. "I don't want to call...
THESE ARE THE KINDS OF THOUGHTS THAT occupy Yale economist Robert Shiller, who with Karl Case of Wellesley has done more than anyone else to document the postmillennium real estate boom and warn about the inevitable bust. Shiller first made his name in the early 1980s attacking the notion, then widely accepted, that the stock market rationally reflects the true value of the companies whose shares are traded on it. He and real estate specialist Case then teamed up to show that home prices are even more subject to booms and busts than stocks. They did it by measuring repeat...