Okay so I was gliding through the articles of CNBC.com and stumbled upon one titled, "A Downgrade of U.S. Debt Won't Matter as Much as You Think." The argument laid down in this piece is that insurance companies and pension funds are required to hold h...

Although Congress can technically dilly dally until August 2nd to come up with an agreement and raise the debt ceiling- markets have anticipated the inevitable. They haven't sat back and decided to wait till August 2nd to panic- they are already in "oh...

Okay so what is the situation at hand? Well the inevitable default of the United States of course.  The U.S. will default regardless of whether Congress raises the debt ceiling. You may be thinking the following: But how can he say such a thing? I...

Okay so one of my best friends Sir Kris "Wespro" Wesslen has started a new blog and i think it's so hilariously decked out with pompous amounts of hilarity that even a blind and brainless mouse would chuckle out of amusement. Please check it out here. ...

In 2009, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff wrote a book titled ,"This Time Is Different" about debt and financial crisis. One of their charts will provide a benchmark for us in our analysis.  This chart can be found on page 121 of the book ...

Let's take a look at who gets the most screwed (who loses the most money) when bond prices collapse and the United States defaults.Well until recently only about 55% of treasury's were held domestically. The rest was externally held by places like Japa...

What should we be expecting when the United States defaults and how will this unsavory process unfold? Well for one thing anticipate the downfall with a downgrade in the credit rating.  According to recent Bloomberg article in the event of a U.S. ...

The following graph shows Real GDP as a percentage of the Gross Federal Debt.  FRED is the resource I frequently use for United States financial data and it serves us well here.  What is Gross Federal Debt? Well, its total government debt out...

Hey guys, I know that I have been gone for awhile now.  I just came back from a month long euro adventure so have no fear, I have plenty of time to devote to blogging now.  From this day forward, X.U. Economics will be known as The Dancing Ec...

This is the last post of this special mini-series on the job search and matching theory of unemployment. I will probably be extremely distracted for the next few months, including a month-long vacation in Europe to shake the horrors of undergrad off me...

This economics blogger feels like he would be cheating the reader if he did not include recent work done by Barnichon and Figura (2010) on timing movements in the unemployment rate during recessions. That is why this is part 4 of my special 5 part mini...