Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I had dinner yesterday in a pub with two sinks in the gents' room. Each had two taps, one red and one blue. The odd thing was that all four put out blazing hot water. Why would anyone bother putting in two taps fed from the same pipe? The waitress asked me, 'Would you like to try our mulled wine?' 'I'll have to think that over', I responded.

I just found out that there is such a dialect just yesterday -- it's basically English spoken with Welsh grammar and a sprinkling of Welsh words.

Well I've been pretty smug with my fellow economist bloggers on the oil speculation issue. But I think my sweeping pronouncements before were too strong (strident?), and that it's possible for speculators to drive up spot prices, without leading to inventory buildup and without forcing oil prices to be in contango. Rather than trying to give more general rules for what can and can't happen, let me just tell a little story, and you tell me if it sounds plausible (or even true!). The Fed has been doing CRAZY stuff trying to resuscitate the credit and real estate markets. And yet many traditional measures of irresponsible monetary policy aren't giving off warnings. (E.g. M1 and M2, long-term bond yields, CPI, and PPI.) So, to put it simplistically, where has all this new money been going? Let's say that the Fed really is injecting hundreds of billions, and that it hits the financial big players first. Where are they going to put it? Real estate? Stocks? Bon...

Stefan Karlsson says in this piece that we must: Note further that commodity speculators can take both long position and short positions. This implies that commodity speculators may not in fact be contributing to higher prices. If speculators as a group have equally large long and short positions then they will have no effect on futures prices, and if they as a group have larger short positions than long positions then their speculations will in fact lower futures prices. Now I am only picking on him because my breakthrough finally was crystallized while reading his article; there have been plenty of apologists for capitalism making this same argument. In any event, as with the claim that the futures price is the market's "best guess" of the spot price at a future date, so too I think the economists here aren't really thinking this through. Let's say the spot price of oil right now is $140, and the futures price for June '09 delivery is $145. (I'm not b...

I have been known to criticize Bryan Caplan , and in fact I have a forthcoming mises.org hatchet job, er thoughtful critique, on him. But in this post he asked a simple question regarding the ability to profit from superior knowledge if futures markets don't go out far enough. And then Tyler Cowen gave a hand-waving appeal to authority that was a non-answer . Arnold Kling dressed up Cowen's response , but check out the comments. JPC knocks Kling on his butt, then kicks him again when Kling tries to stand back up. What must really be frustrating for Caplan is that these answers imply that Caplan hadn't thought of such obvious "solutions." Caplan purposefully rigged his initial scenario so that these obvious techniques wouldn't work. I feel your pain, Bryan. The experts have been blowing me off for years too. Come join me, and together we can rule the blogosphere!

The Weekly Standard has a new piece that relies very heavily on my IER report on speculators . I wonder if they will heed my policy recommendation to reduce demand by pulling the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan?* * The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of IER staff or management.

I'm reading a very entertaining book by Walter Gratzer called Eurekas and Euphorias . It consists of quite a few, curious or amusing, short tales from the history of science. One of my favorites is about the absent-minded physicist Sir Nevill Mott. One day Mott, who had been a professor of physics in Bristol for many years, was riding the train from London to Bristol when three things struck him at at once: 1) He no longer lived or worked in Bristol, having been appointed Cavendish Professor at Cambridge; 2) He had driven to London that day; and 3) His wife had accompanied him.