It appears that economists at Infometrics believe New Zealand is not hurting enough from the global recession – that we aren’t noticing the true underlying risk of our debt position. Well at least that is what the title says. Reading the article indicates to me that the commentary is not on the current crisis at […]
I have a question on loss aversion, as I am confused. I keep seeing loss aversion defined like this: our tendency to feel sadder about losing, say, $1,000 than feeling happy about gaining that same amount But this sounds like diminishing marginal utility to me. I mean, the $1,000 dollars I’m losing provides me with […]
Strict neo-classical economists need to realise that there ARE systematic deviations from tightly defined rationality and as economists we should try to understand these deviations (although preferably deviations can still be incorporated into a more general version of our framework). Behavioural economists should realise that these deviations are far less common than they believe, and […]
So when consumer confidence rose in December because of falling fuel prices there were people saying it was because of the National government. When net migration started to turn at the start of 2009 there were mummers of it being because of the National government. Now that it is clear that departures have collapsed Immigration […]
From a blog that it looking at each day in 1930 we have this beaut of a quote (ht Paul Krugman, and initially Scott Sumner): Leading economists and market observers are looking for clues on how long the current trade depression will continue. Since 1873 there have been thirteen periods of business depression. Ten of […]
Apologises for my long delay from the blog – I am afraid that it will continue for the next couple of weeks. I am on an economics adventure, trying to fight the beast of recession with sketchy logic and econometrics 😉 However, I had to say something about this recent Westpac article on bank funding […]