This is a completely unfair attack on Stalin. Which is a pity, because the rest of it is very sensible. I don't know if it is laziness or Trotskyism which leads you to this casual dragging in of Stalin, but it should be resisted as firmly as an instant invocation of Hitler.

I'm afraid it is looking increasingly as if President Obama was right to doubt if Janet Yellen was the woman for the job. Larry Summers shows a much clearer understanding of the economy's needs.

The obvious alternative definition of "credible." And since I long ago stopped believing anything that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson et al say, their warnings against Corbyn don't work.

I think something people ignore is that lots of these questions involve issues where Obama is intellectually weak. As one of his chief campaign advisers said "Barack is not really a numbers guy." That's why he is so susceptible to people like Geithner. Doesn't mean that those people are necessarily wrong. But Obama, in spite of his obvious cleverness in some things, is not really equipped to judge.

Got it in one.

Cohen was, of course, Obama's first choice to be Deputy Treasury Secretary under Tim Geithner. Tells you how deeply the Obama team were committed to Change You Can Believe In.

But the ice cream stall which set up inland won't be the only survIvor when rains wreck the beach. Because the inland stall will have gone bust in the years before. This is exactly what happened witH the banks. Banks which were cautious lost business and eventually had to sell out to the risk taking Banks which made big money when times were good. The reason that we only had badly indebted and over extended banks like RBS in 2007 is that they had bought up all the cautious ones. Hotelling strategies are inevitable even though they do indeed sometimes lead to Minsky crashes

This attack is entirely spurious. If not dishonest it shows shocking ignorance of grammar. I have checked the original article and it is clear that the authors are not making fools of themselves in the way you imply. A colon separates the comment on Plato on Aristotle from the reference to the six modern philosophers. The use of ..... To cover this really is not acceptable.

This piece seems to rely very heavily on proof by assertion. "Tenure denials are never arbitrary." Really? If a man with 5 published articles and a woman is not, there must be a reason. Maybe. But why can't that reason be gender discrimination? Once you assert an argument must be wrong because it must be wrong, you have won a very easy victory in your own mind but are not likely to change the minds of others.

There many reasons Germany gets away with it. One is that it does not really accept that power with the EU is distributed according to votes. Instead it acts as if it plays the role in Europe which Prussia played in Imperial Germany. Thus it is assumed that if if the German constitutional court says ECB actions breach the GERMAN constitution, the ECB cannot act. Does anyone believe that a constitutional court in, say, Italy, would be taken seriously in such a situation. Tied in with this is the French obsession with appearing to be a partner in key decisions, which effectively means giving in to German demands.

The gap vanishes by the time people get to 25. Maybe men are taking longer to grow up.

No one who really wants to scoff a huge amount of food likes sushi in the first place. So not a problem.

Dave is right. I think that not only does he not understand macro, he doesn't understand anything to do with figures. After all, one of his chief political strategists said "Barack's not really a numbers guy." And in possibly the most perceptive piece of journalism this year the NYT's Gail Collins pointed out that in his farewell poker game in Chicago the local pols cleaned him out. The really annoying thing about Romney was that he was so bad that people had to vote for Obama.

I was working in the fixed income division of a leading investment bank sometimes thought of as an aquatic creature at the time. It took us a while to work out what was happening, but eventually we decided that the Fed and markets had built up a feedback loop. The Fed tightened. Bonds sold off partly as an automatic eaction but also because markets thought the Fed might know something. The Fed tightened again; markets thought the Fed must know something about inflation, so bonds sold off. Commodity prices were rising, so the Fed worried that might impact on inflation (in Europe the first central bank to hike was Sweden, and they actually cited coffee prices as the reason.) Some big hedge funds decided to go short bonds long commodities. And then the loop completed. The Fed decided that the market must know something it didn't know, so it raided rates. Markets felt the Fed must know something really bad and was intending more hikes so bonds sold off. Greenspan later admitted that some of the Fed hikes had not been necessary. They had been counter-productive. The Fed was raising rates because the bond market was selling off. The bond market was selling off because the Fed was raising rates. No one cared at all what was happening to the deficit.

That's 627 votes more than the LibDems deserve.