Observations, Calculations, and Values
Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture wrote an excellent post about what the US Government should be doing with AIG. Basically, he describes separating the company between its legitimate, healthy, regulated, life insurance writing business, and its unregulated, insolvent, derivative business. Of the former:
This half of the company held the most important insurance in many [...]
I like the above graph showing the federal debt levels over time, segmented by presidency. It’s the same story as what I showed here, but a better graphical representation.
Above is a familiar map of the 2008 election results, but the cartographer scaled the map to reflect population sizes. According to its producer:
“The sizes of states are rescaled according to their population. That is, states are drawn with size proportional not to their acreage but to the number of their inhabitants, states [...]
What struck me about the election result, in addition to the election of Obama, was that the Democrats fared better in 08 than they did in 04 in all but eight states.
There are about 300 million people in the US, and there are 580 electoral votes up for grabs. This means that, on average, each electoral vote is worth about 560k votes. But, 560k is an average, and your mileage may vary, depending on where you live. Texas, for example, has 24 million [...]
I’m in the middle of Alan Greenspan’s autobiography, “The Age of Turbulence“. One point that I found interesting was his perspective on George W. Bush’s reluctance to use the presidential veto. Greenspan called this a “hallmark” of Bush’s presidency. The below chart is my creation, based on veto data from Wikipedia.
In [...]
Republicans have been labeling Democrats as “tax and spend” at least since Johnson tried to create his “Great Society”. The trouble I have with such a moniker is that it misrepresents the history of the growth in Federal Debt levels.
The above graph shows the percentage change in Federal debt levels, based on [...]
The New York Times ran the above picture in the paper today, and the related story linked to the below interactive map. It’s similar to the the Yahoo version, which was the first visinomics post.
Typical Republican rhetoric is that they are the party of low taxes and small government. Reagan built the party platform with his mantra that, “Government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.” The Republicans like to portray the Democrats with the moniker of “Tax and spend, tax and spend”. On their watches, [...]
This is a clip from Dec ‘07, shows Ron Paul raising some key issues around interest rates, inflation, and the value of the dollar. Bernanke shrugs.