CYNICONOMICS |

For anyone who wonders about stories never told, there’s an interesting article by Ron Unz that’s been circulating the web (I found it on Marginal Revolution).

Alongside a variety of criticisms of media reporting from World War II to recent times, Unz focuses especially on three potentially huge stories that were mostly or entirely ignored by the mainstream media. He acknowledges that you can’t be 100% sure they’re true, but at the same time he suggests overwhelming evidence for each of the following:

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Do you need a break from public policy buzzwords? Are you happy to go back to the days when cliffs were discussed occasionally on the National Geographic channel but not analyzed ad nauseum on CNBC? Are you tired of reading about austerity, austerians, anti-austerians and austeresis?

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Update (May 17) – Here’s another analysis of recent improvements in the FY2013 budget deficit, this one from Charles Biderman of TrimTabs (via ZeroHedge). Biderman keeps close tabs on the budget and offers a breakdown of the changes that we’re seeing in both year-to-date results and full year projections.

You may have seen that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its new long-term budget and debt forecasts this week.

I’ve written quite a bit about the problems with CBO projections (examples here and here), but I don’t know when I’ll read the new document (still working through David Stockman’s 712 pages of deformation!).

For now, here’s an article by Ross Douthat (h/t Marginal Revolution) that I think is really well-done, even though his highly qualified attempt to give some credit to the White House makes me uncomfortable.

Way back in early March – before we witnessed new extremes in sloppy island bailouts and malicious economist witch hunts – I promised to “wield a ruler” and clear up some fallacies about the lengths of the things. The idea is that lengths are sometimes, well, exaggerated.

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Here are two of the objections to Saturday’s “More Reasons to Call Off the Reinhart-Rogoff Witch Hunt” from a commenter (on Seeking Alpha) who contributed a competing list of “pet peeves” to counter my list:

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On Monday, I posted an article that one pundit introduced on Twitter with the words: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a Reinhart-Rogoff defender.”

Needless to say, comment threads on the sites that published my article have been interesting.

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This morning’s quarterly bank lending survey capped off a series of indicators with a bleak message for the Eurozone economy. Almost all signs suggest that Europe continues to spiral downwards.

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Update (May 2): We’re finally seeing more fair-minded commentators taking a balanced view of Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s research. After investigating data discrepancies for New Zealand (pointed out by reader Margaret below), Bloomberg’s Matthew C. Klein called out the three University of Massachusetts Amherst authors for not recognizing that the so-called data “omissions” were suspect data points as explained by Reinhart and Rogoff all along (h/t Marginal Revolution). ECONJEFF would have liked to have seen more “professional courtesy” and called for economists to establish “norms of good behavior” for replications/critiques. Also, John Mauldin applied his usual clear thinking to the topic in his weekly “Outside the Box” article. And blogger George Washington looks at the bigger picture in the austerity debate, noting Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s advocacy of debt write-downs in Europe (which would have meant less austerity in countries like Ireland and Portugal) and stressing that until governments stop saving “the big banks instead of the little guy” and other basic problems are fixed, “neither stimulus nor austerity can ever work” (h/t Angry Bear).

For those surfers who haven’t already lost interest in the spirited debate over a 2% calculation discrepancy in an historical average, please read on.

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When data released last year showed China losing its appetite for U.S. bonds, it didn’t cause much concern. Sure, some bloggers took notice, such as the always alert Tyler Durden(s) in this post. But most pundits saw other countries picking up the slack and decided to “move along, nothing to see here.”

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