Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent background story today (Saturday/Sunday July 25-26, 2009) on the wide variety of scrips and improvised currencies in the Depression years, with a comparison to the IOUs issued over the last three weeks by the state of California. The bottom line of the story is the California IOUs are […]

I am no expert on the Supreme Court, or confirmation hearings, or any related stuff, so I haven’t posted about the Sotomayor hearings. But I have learned a lot about the process, including many sensible policy recommendations, in a short, very well-written book by Benjamin Wittes, Confirmation Wars. it came about a couple of years […]

The first topic in my corporate finance class – starting in, alas, not very many weeks – is valuation and market efficiency. This is a law school class, and the approach to valuation is not technical; it is mostly just a description of why it is important, in the context of a survey class that […]

Your esteemed blogger is going in for a colonoscopy tomorrow. He is unenthused about the procedure, but even less enthused about possible alternative scenarios. He has conducted a careful cost-benefit analysis and the benefits win. This is not a case of a post containing Too Much Information – Professor Anderson has lost not one, but […]

I guess Ezra Klein’s latest column – post? – whatever, wherein he deems himself up to taking on Greg Mankiw, is the right time for a question that has popped up whenever I have considered the trajectory of young Ezra. Would Klein be a better writer/thinker/pundit/blogger/wonk/whatever if he had actually done some of the “reporting” […]

Megan McArdle perfectly expresses my feelings – my sadness and disappointment, in fact – on this anniversary of the lunar landing: If you’re like me (and I know many of you are), you grew up reading the science fiction of the 1940’s and 1950’s, promising a quick and rapid expansion into the solar system, and […]

in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Why Toxic Assets Are So Hard to Clean Up,” Opinion, July 20, 2009, probably behind wall), showing with examples how fantastically complex, and effectively impossible to value, securitization derivatives had(ve) become. Scott and Taylor are Stanford professors jointly affiliated with the Hoover Institution there (as I’m pleased to say I […]

I see that I’m quoted by Mark Mazetti and Scott Shane in their New York Times article today, CIA Had Plan to Assassinate Qaeda Leaders (July 13, 2009). I’m trying hard to maintain radio silence and not blog to let my shoulder heal up, but let me say something very brief about this. First, I’m […]

I am going to be on lite-blogging status for a while, due to a pinched nerve and muscle tear caused – everyone please take careful note – not by my Athletic and Extreme Sports lifestyle, but by bad ergonomic habits at the keyboard. Let me assure you, at this moment you really, really do not […]

courtesy of Von Cello at a Yankees game. Not as good as Matt Haimovitz at CBGB on acoustic cello doing his version of Hendrix, but the best I could come up with on YouTube. Hope this works. I can’t figure out how to embed the video the way everyone else does. This is further to […]

If you are a music lover and particularly, like me, a lover of the music of the 18th century, then you will be fascinated by Barrymore Laurence Scherer’s (July 2, 2009) essay in the Wall Street Journal on Thomas Jefferson’s musical tastes. I was not aware that Jefferson was an avid violinist, for example – […]

according to Stan Liebowitz, reporting in the WSJ today (Friday, July 3, 2009 not sure if publicly available) on a regression analysis he conducted of home mortgage foreclosures. I wonder what co-blogger Todd makes of this; I’m not expert enough in the numbers surrounding home mortgages to say. However, as the article says, there certainly […]

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I have been reading David Denby’s book, Snark. I have some problems with that book, but they are essentially the same ones that the reviewers have talked about, viz., that Denby’s book is ultimately dissatisfying because it adopts a partisan view of snark. It seems odd to me that an obviously smart person like Denby […]

A quick, further note to co-blogger John Elwood’s posts on the Obama administration’s use of signing statements. I’m sure someone has mentioned this in the comments somewhere, but over at Opinio Juris, Julian Ku has posted up video of then-candidate Obama denouncing the use of signing statements and promising not to use them. “Hypocrisy” is […]