Kevin Drum 🕸

Very pretty rainbow(s) over our house to end the day. I guess that's one good thing about endless rainshowers.

According to Datalytics, here's how things look on the homicide front so far in 2023: Down 10% so far! And that's on top of last year's 5% decline. This isn't enough to make up for the 30% increase during the pandemic, but we're getting there.

Is the Fed going to raise rates tomorrow? According to the Atlanta Fed's prediction tool, the answer is maybe: Before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the probability of a rate hike was 97%, a virtual certainty. After the collapse, that probability dropped to 40% and currently stands at 55%. Place your bets. POSTSCRIPT: Needless ...continue reading "There’s a 50-50 chance of a Fed rate hike tomorrow"

This is a house finch and, um, maybe a yellow warbler feasting away at our bird feeder in the late afternoon sun.

Over the past year or two I've commented on three conventional narratives that strike me as dead wrong: The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster. The CDC's response to COVID-19 was atrocious. Silicon Valley Bank was a time bomb waiting to go off. The common thread for all of these was an almost instant desire to ...continue reading "Narratives of doom get set in stone almost instantly these days. Why?"

The New York Times reports today on life inside the CDC during the early days of the COVID pandemic. In early March 2020, a bunch of young CDC scientists gathered in a small park across the street from headquarters to discuss whether COVID could be transmitted by people who showed no signs of infection. And ...continue reading "CDC critics should turn their bazookas on Donald Trump instead"

The Wall Street Journal says that in February home prices fell for the first time in 11 years. That's sort of true, but not really: February was the first time in 11 years that home prices fell if you look at year-over-year figures and don't adjust for inflation. But if you just chart real home ...continue reading "House prices stabilized in February"

Eric Levitz writes in New York about America's housing crisis: The scale of our folly only becomes clear when the second-order effects of the housing crisis are brought into view. The most productive and economically vibrant parts of the U.S. are also the places where housing supply has lagged most egregiously behind demand....According to one ...continue reading "Education, not cities, is the key to productivity growth"

A new paper is out today that tries to estimate job losses from ChatGPT and other similar apps based on Large Language Models. The paper includes much talk of binning and rubrics and OLS regressions, all with lots of Greek letters scattered around. But you don't care about that, since it all boils down to ...continue reading "Here’s a list of jobs that are safe from the ChatGPT revolution"

The latest on First Republic Bank: Eleven big banks banded together last week to deposit $30 billion in First Republic in an effort to restore confidence in the lender. The San Francisco-based bank’s customers have withdrawn some $70 billion since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. ...continue reading "First Republic was a strong bank, but not strong enough during a panic"

Here's an entire trip from Paris to Los Angeles in four photos. From the top: (a) our plane, (b) the village of Goussainville, about 30 seconds after takeoff, (c) Hudson Bay, halfway home, and (d) crossing the San Diego Freeway, about 30 seconds before landing.

It's the 20th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War Against the Terrorist Saddam Hussein, and many people think this is a good time for retrospectives. Personally, I'd prefer to forget about the whole thing, but I suppose that's a bad idea. Still, although I've explained before why I eventually turned against the war,¹ I'm not ...continue reading "Why I supported the Iraq War . . . for a while"

Here's the latest from the IPCC on our progress toward reining in climate change: Bottom line: Current policies "lead to warming of 3.2°C." That's about 6°F for real Americans who don't use the metric system. I sometimes think that this whole business of using temperature rises to describe climate change is misguided. In the US, ...continue reading "IPCC6: We are fucked (but don’t say that)"

The Fed is fighting back. It's been criticized for not supervising Silicon Valley Bank properly, so now it's leaking the news that it did indeed supervise them: In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks....But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July ...continue reading "The Fed fights back . . . with leaks"

Brad DeLong comments this weekend on a couple of essays that lament the difficulty of living in an era where technological progress is improving exponentially: I read these, and I think: this is how it has been since the 1870s. Perhaps this is how it has been since the late 1830s. Well, yes. But there's ...continue reading "Exponential growth is messing with our minds"

The Washington Post has a story today about the demise of ER physicians. It used to be a coveted position for residencies, but now senior doctors are warning against it: They warn of burnout after covid and patients’ increasing suspicion of doctors. The pay is not as good, they say, especially as hospitals rely more ...continue reading "Emergency medicine is in the SOAP"

You're all probably tired of hearing me natter on about Silicon Valley Bank, but the conventional narrative continues to bug me. The most persistent part of the narrative is that SVB had a bond portfolio exposed to lots of interest rate risk and they were morons for not hedging this risk. But normally, you hedge ...continue reading "SVB didn’t collapse because of unhedged interest rate bets"

Tom Nichols is unimpressed with today's story about John Connally's 1980 mission to let the Iranians know they should wait a while before releasing the embassy hostages: Has it occurred to anyone that the Iranians hated Carter's guts because of the Shah and did what they did just to spite him? Of *course* they were ...continue reading "More on Ronald Reagan and the hostages"

As we all know, Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid against Ronald Reagan thanks in part to the long-running Iranian hostage drama. It's long been suspected that Reagan's team actively tried to persuade Iran not to release the hostages so that Carter wouldn't get a victory bump, but there's never been any firm proof. ...continue reading "Reagan team tried to sabotage hostage talks before the 1980 election"

With the release of ChatGPT, the chattering classes began to chatter about the safety of artificial intelligence. Partly this was about things ChatGPT could do right now (help kids cheat in school, for example) but mostly it was about the possibility of AI destroying humanity at some point in the future. But there's an odd ...continue reading "The real danger of artificial intelligence is natural intelligence"