Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford has a short post on the cash for clunkers program and any issues that might arise under the WTO, including some interesting stats on what kinds of cars are being bought.

(Update: In other news out of Washington DC today, my sixteen year old daughter got her driver’s license this morning, in a road test that she herself described as “weirdly easy” and which Dad will rephrase as “alarmingly” so.) “Overhaul Stumbles” is how the headline the Wall Street Journal put things this morning in its […]

I am not trying to be snarky here. This is a genuine question. Suppose, by assumption (as some reports have it) that a recovery is now getting underway – this might be true or false, take it as true by assumption. Unemployment, let us also take by assumption, will continue to rise as a lagging […]

Last weekend, at the Divisionals for my kid’s swim team, it was Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. This week, at the All-Stars, where the Kid swam fly and medley, I re-read (finally finished this morning), Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000). It traces the relationship between art and commerce, and here is a sample […]

A brief note responding to a couple of comments on my post on Brad Roth’s paper. We have to distinguish here between “liberal” or, if one prefers, “progressive,” on the one hand, and the “international law academy” in the US context, on the other. It is not that the international law academy is not “liberal” […]

is not as bad as you might have thought and, as it happens, has important advantages. (I ran across this in the latest Hoover Digest, and then found it had been making the rounds.) Dr. Atlas is also head of the neuroradiology department at Stanford Medical School. (Full disclosure: I’m also affiliated with Hoover). Dr. […]

Brad Roth, an old friend and law and political science professor at Wayne State University, delivers a heck of a punch with his new paper, set to appear in Santa Clara Journal of International Law (2009), but up in draft at SSRN, “Coming to Terms with Ruthlessness: Sovereign Equality, Global Pluralism, and the Limits of […]

As I’ve mentioned in some earlier posts, I’ve been doing a read of literature on the crisis, books coming out now – but at my kid’s last swim meet, I took along instead Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. That book, from the 1980s, holds up better than just about anything from that period. He does a […]

Is the problem that they are too high? The Washington Post reports today on anger in Congress and elsewhere at the size of bankers’ bonuses. NY AG Andrew Cuomo’s office released a report yesterday with the unsubtle title, “No Rhyme or Reason: The ‘Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’ Bank Bonus Culture.”. According the Post’s […]

Up until fairly recently, I had full access though some consulting work to ISDA and all the swap master agreements, documentation, etc., etc., available on the ISDA site. I don’t anymore, and when I asked our library to get it for me, they (rightly) pointed out that what I seemed to have in mind would […]

One reform to financial market regulation that has been widely (though not universally) endorsed is putting credit derivatives onto organized clearing exchanges. It is, for example, an important part of the Treasury White Paper on financial regulation reform. The WSJ ran a story yesterday, “Derivatives Plan Is Expected” (Thursday, July 30, 2009, C7) on where […]

My Washington College of Law, American University friend and colleague, Jonathan Baker, has been named chief economist to the FCC. Congratulations, Jon! Jon is primarily a specialist in competition law, and also teaches law and economics, among other things, at WCL. He is a great professor and scholar, with long experience in senior government positions, […]

According to this new paper (HT McArdle & WSJ), it constitutes a “true economic subsidy for obesity.” As one of the WSJ economics blogs sums the paper up: According to the paper, which estimates weight gain in terms of body mass index, a measure of weight related to height, “private insurance increases BMI by 1.3 […]

Dan Drezner, at his blog at the Foreign Policy blog site, lists his selections for the top ten books of international economic history. Let me raid his list plus commentary: 1. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (2007). I’ve already tagged this book as an interesting read. If […]

The legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham has died at the age of 90. He and John Cage altered the landscape of the avant garde in dance and music. When younger, I attended a lot of dance recitals – I took a fair amount of dance, despite having anything but the body type for it. The fencing […]