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24 Nov 2009

Counting Jobs Created or Saved by the "Stimulus" Bill, Part 2:
Program design prevents error correction

The federal government's reported figures for jobs "created or saved" by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or "ARRA") are now known to be wrong. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees these figures, apparently has decided not to correct them.

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20 Nov 2009

Counting Jobs Created or Saved by the "Stimulus" Bill:
A lesson in information quality

by Richard Belzer

in Information Quality

A scandal has erupted over the federal government's reporting of the number of jobs created or saved by the "stimulus" bill (formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).

This scandal would have been avoided if the government had complied with the Information Quality Act.

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29 Jul 2009

What's Suddenly Wrong with the Oil Market? Part 3:
Open disagreement about 'speculation'

by Richard Belzer

in Regulatory Economics, Regulatory Policy

On July 8 we blogged on a commentary published in the Wall Street Journal under the joint bylines of UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The two European leaders alleged that speculation had damaged the world crude oil market by making it "dangerously volatile." We surmised that the sudden interest in oil market speculation, which seemed to have come out of the blue, was instead highly coordinated. There is now more evidence supporting that hypothesis, but some indication that it is encountering resistance.
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