• Not the Treasury view...: Which (macro)-economists are worth listening to?
  Who's worth listening to?
  • Krugman, Delong and Wren-Lewis on fiscal policy when interest rates are at the zero lower bound;
  • Adam Posen on monetary policy when interest rates are at the zero lower bound;
  • Paul de Grauwe on sovereign and eurozone debt;
  • Martin ( Read more... )

• [cryptography] Key extraction from tokens (RSA SecurID, etc) via padding attacks on PKCS#1v1.5
  This is a great description of the attack on RSA tokens that's going to be presented at Crypto. It turns out that PKCS#1 padding is so broken that you can use its flaws to decrypt any message, even messages that weren't encrypted using PKCS#1 in the ( Read more... )

• BBC News - Barclays: Cameron says bank faces 'serious questions'
  The bankers continue to look like a very undeserving bunch of recipients of free money. More and more I'm a fan of the Atrios approach: if there's a financial crisis, work out how much money might go down the pan, print that amount of money, and give it out evenly to everyone. ( Read more... )

• Why Bernanke’s not doing more | Felix Salmon
  This is a Matt Yglesias point originally, but worth repeating: if the central bank has credibility on inflation, it doesn't need to keep inflation low all the time. It only needs to keep inflation low to establish credibility. If a focus on low inflation right now is keeping employment down, and if the ( Read more... )

Via Matthew Yglesias a nice Paul Krugman article from 1998 about recessions, using babysitting as an extended metaphor/example. It doesn't really say anything you don't already know, but having everything expressed concretely in terms of a single-industry economy makes it easier to get your head around than a more accurate but more jargon-ridden

Via Marginal Revolution, this pdf from Brad DeLong (33 double-spaced large-font pages) on why increased international capital flows haven't benefited the poor in poor countries ( Read more... )

From The Washington Post, via RISKS Like a lot of small-scale entrepreneurs, Cathy Osborne worries that she'll go out of business if fuel prices rise above $4 a gallon. Not because she won't be able to buy gas at that price, but because she won't be able to sell it.
The old mechanical gas pumps with scrolling dials at her country store in ( Read more... )