Word: economisters
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...more than ever on foreign money to sustain growth. For Greenspan and his colleagues at the Fed, which has been gradually raising interest rates over the past year, the quandary is whether to quicken the pace or take a break. "You don't know exactly when to stop," says economist Mark Zandi of Economy.com "If history is any guide, they...
Considering that many economists never believe such long-range forecasts, Greenspan's defense left many observers shaking their heads. His argument that he supported tax cuts only in general--not the Bush tax cuts--has also tarnished his credibility. "What the U.S. needs is a truly politically independent central banker," says Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach. "When Greenspan expresses his opinions on nonmonetary policy issues, whether he wants to admit it or not, he becomes identified as an advocate and it influences the decision making...
Whoever gets the job obviously has a very tough act to follow, in more ways than one. "In the short term, he did wonders for the U.S. economy, but now we are saddled with the bill," says Ravi Batra, an economist at Southern Methodist University and author of a new polemic, Greenspan's Fraud: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy. That's a harsh verdict. But if Alan Greenspan misses the universal acclaim he once enjoyed, he may have only himself to blame. It was Greenspan, after all, who famously warned about the perils...
Imagine a whip-smart economist with a sprawling imagination. Now imagine he's 9 years old and wants to know everything. That is the basic profile of Steven Levitt. A University of Chicago economist, Levitt, 37, is in fact an adult. But he has built his name by asking questions packed with curiosity and devoid of judgment: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their moms? Did crime in the 1990s go down because the number of abortions in the 1970s went up, or is that just a coincidence? Does parenting actually matter when...
...book he remains blissfully devoted to facts, even unpleasant ones. He calmly displays evidence that abortion has had a greater effect on crime than have broken-window strategies of policing or economic prosperity. But as a crime-control measure, it is "terribly inefficient," he writes, as only an economist could, since the number of aborted fetuses is so exponentially greater than the number of lives saved through less violence...