Recent Articles from Tucker Adams
The Economist: The art of forecasting
Economists have been taking it on the chin recently. After the failure of most of my colleagues to warn of the Great Recession – some arrogantly boasted that their computer models had eliminated risk and the possibility of recession – the profession’s ability to foretell the future has pretty much been written off. I’ll let […]
The Economist: The deficit/debt fiasco
As I expected, Congress dealt with the debt ceiling crisis at the ninth hour by raising the ceiling and appointing a committee (the third), leaving the basic problem unaddressed. The market for U.S. Treasury securities yawned – there is still no safer place for your money – while the stock market swooned, then bounced back. […]
The Economist: Colorado’s job growth hasn’t kept pace with population
A whole passel of topics is piling up in my folder of column ideas, none quite enough for an entire column but all of them things that are interesting and important. So, this month I thought I would comment on several of them. One thing that mystifies me is the disparity between population growth and […]
The Economist: Are we headed for trouble?
The Duchess of Doom title gets old after awhile. Except for pointing out the dangers of the housing/debt bubble back in 2006 and correctly forecasting that it would lead to a recession by the end of 2007, I’ve been pretty upbeat about the American economy over the years. But I’m starting to get worried again. […]
The Economist: Are Americans getting poorer or wealthier?
The concepts of wealth and income are frequently confused, and the two words used interchangeably. In fact they are quite different. Income is a flow – in other words it has a time dimension. Wealth is a stock, a snapshot at an instant in time. Income can add to or subtract from wealth, depending on whether […]
The Economist: What is adverse selection—and do I really care?
Almost 25 years ago, I was invited to join the board of a big property and casualty insurance company, my first public company board. I learned a lot in my years on the board. I learned that a director has a Duty of Care and a Duty of Loyalty; that it is possible to insure […]
The Economist: How far have we come?
Economists are notorious pack rats. We save everything. I suppose today’s crop of younger economists retain their information in electronic form or out there in “the cloud,” but my generation clips and photocopies and prints and files. Over the course of 35 years, that adds up to quite a bit of paper. A few months […]
The Economist: Can we borrow our way out of debt?
A few weeks ago the White House and Republicans reached a compromise to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and to extend unemployment benefits to households whose benefits are running out. It reminded us of a cartoon we saw recently that shows a person saying to his banker, “I want to borrow money so […]
The Eonomist: Things to do in 2011?
I’ve just finished reading my granddaughter’s senior honors thesis on improving bikeability (i.e., riding our bikes to work or on errands), a thoughtful, brilliant piece of work in my totally unbiased point of view. It got me to thinking about things we can all do in 2011 to treat our planet a bit more gently. […]
The Economist: The dirty little secret
There’s a dirty little secret out there: No one can provide a quick fix for the economy. Not the president. Not the new Republican Congress. Not the Federal Reserve. It took us a long time to get into this mess, and it is going to take a long time to get out of it.That said, […]
The Economist: What is money?
Since I wrote about stone money and the unimportance of gold last month, this month seems like a good time to examine what really is money. At the end of the year, faced with holiday gift giving and year-end taxes, it’s a topic on everyone’s mind. More than 30 years ago I wrote my Ph.D. […]
The Economist: Why gold?
I was in New York City a few weeks ago and had a chance to tour the New York Federal Reserve Bank. One of my graduate fields was in monetary theory, so I was excited to visit the place that is the heart of monetary policy execution. Decisions made by the Open Market Committee of […]