Welcome to The Street Light

For about two and a half years, I was one of the principal writers on the blog Angry Bear, writing about economics and politics. It is a great blog, and I had lots of fun with my excellent coauthors trying to keep up with current news in economics and politics in the US. During my time as a principal writer at Angry Bear we saw it all, from the ridiculous to the sublime. True, the ridiculous moments seemed far more common, but oh well.

Then, I was forced to take a bit of hiatus from blogging by the demands of the rest of my life. Yah, it’s that old “real life” excuse: jobs, moving, family, and so forth. It turns out that those things can take up quite a bit of time, if you actually pay attention to them. But now I’m now ready to put all of that behind me and get back to blogging again. This time, however, I’ll be hosting my own show, so to speak. Welcome to my new blog, The Street Light.

Here I plan to share my writing, interpretation, and economic analysis of all sorts of current economic events, with particular emphasis on 1) the financial markets; and 2) economic policy-making. I like those two topics particularly because they are both so byzantine and unfathomable that sticking to those topics will leave less chance for me to be obviously wrong.

I have two primary goals for this blog. My first goal is to help provide some understanding to non-economists of what the heck economists are talking about. I think that many economists actually do important economic analysis that can actually provide some pretty good insights into a lot of today’s important topics – but since economists are typically so bad at communicating, those insights are often lost on most people. I’d like to help bridge that gap in communication, at least a little. (Ideally I should have a certificate in English-Econobabble translation, but I suppose I’m just going to have to wing it.)

My second goal is to actually provide some actual economic analysis of current economic events. The analysis that I present here is not intended to provided the definitive end-of-debate answer, of course; instead, the goal is to offer quick and timely first looks at a particular issue, event, or phenomenon that help to clarify what’s going on. Expect a hearty diet of lots of charts and graphs.

How well I manage to achieve these two goals will have to be judged by my readers, of course. But if I manage to help anyone – even myself – to understand what’s going on the world in a somewhat new or different way, then I’ll feel satisfied.