japan-style deflation

Was deflation the cause or the symptom of the weak economy?  I suspect it was more a reinforcing symptom but that, even without deflation, the economy would still have been moribund.  Just thinking about QE2 and its purported goal of avoiding deflation (rather than pumping up asset prices, especially housing and equities).

I'm pretty sure I've heard this story

Gold, stocks, etc. have been rising recently.  Isn't most of this simply a function of a declining dollar?  In other words, inflation?  An asset bubble?  Much of the government's stimulus efforts seem to have been translated into increased holdings of financial assets rather than increased spending.  Which isn't great for TIPS (CPI flat, asset prices way up).

Oh well.

awesome awesome

Just an awesome awesome article about health care. Unfortunately, unlikely to have any results but just so correct (and, I can't resist saying, consistent with much of what I've believed and said over the past years).

saving for the future

For a long time I've wondered how to make sense of an extreme example. Assume we are all the same age. And we all save diligently for retirement. And we all retire at roughly the same age. What are those savings worth? Anything? If cash? If non-portable assets? If portable assets? I'm thinking about conversion of retirement savings into services and whether this means, if the stock of available services is roughly fixed (number of people available to provide the services), that you just see crazy inflation. Oddly, does this also mean that, if we all got uniformly poorer (for example, if all of our equity portfolios got cut by 40%), is there a more muted effect than you might expect? I don't really get it.