G10 Advancers and Decliners vs USD JPY 0.41 EUR -0.55 GBP -0.62 CHF -0.68 The USD has remained bid throughout the day as poor equity market performances have moderated risk appetite. Commodities including gold and silver have retraced markedly from their highs, with gold dipping ... Re ... Read more

The Iowa Fiscal Partnership has generated some headlines by passing around their take on a new study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy: Study says Iowa tax system unfair to poor Report: Iowa tax code favors wealthiest residents Report: Iowa tax system hurts low an ... Rea ... Read more

Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if they disapproved of this postponement. The question was how heavily to weight the negatives -- those who ... Read more

If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC's piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron book club ... Read more

We economists have a reputation for being dry and boring. That's why Ben Stein's scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off works so well — and why this guy is such a novelty. Given our dismal reputation, I am happy to report that some economists' recent defenses of the efficient-markets hypothesis are lau ... Read more

Like the previous day, moderate morning weakness was followed by equally subdued afternoon buying interest. However, this time the major indices were unable to recover back into positive territory. The S&P and Dow held up the best, as each index slipped just 0.1% A bit of selling pressure amongst ... Read more