San Francisco
Transportation's Value-Added Funding Option
As if we needed more reminding, the country has a huge gap between costs required for transportation needs and the funding sources to pay for them.
Why Newsom Dropped Out
Joe Mathews is the Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. In the days ahead, you may hear all kinds of explanations for why San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the race for governor. Poor fundraising. Poor standing the polls. Internal problems in his campaign. But none of them were decisive. Newsom had only one problem, but it was a problem to which there simply is no solution. That problem is the name Brown. This state has had only three Democratic governors in the past 67 years. Pat Brown. His son Jerry. And Jerry's chief of staff Gray Davis.
End State
California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door. Immigrants from Europe had come to America seeking happiness and a break with their unhappy pasts.
Do the Fed's Rate Cuts Still Have Juice?
Jose Lopez at the San Francisco Fed takes a look at the Fed's power to influence a wide variety of market interest rates and finds that, despite improving economic conditions, the relationship between the fed funds rate (the rate the Fed controls) and other rates is still broken. The following chart from Lopez's analysis shows the pre- and post-crisis movements of the inflation-adjusted fed funds rate (blue line) and an indicator for 13 different market rates (red line): The disconcerting thing about this picture is that the gap between the funds rate and market rates is wider now than at any
Just a Cartoon, But Still: Is Family Guy in Blackface Funny?
To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is? Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense.
Economic Recovery? Not So Fast!
The Federal Reserve’s latest Beige Book, released yesterday, painted a cautiously optimistic portrait of the state of the nation’s economy. The New York Times, reporting on the Beige Book, heralded a “slow and still fragile recovery” that is “taking hold across the country.” But even if the data bear out this anecdotal assessment, don’t think that a robust recovery is going to appear in your metro area anytime soon. Here’s why: In many parts of the country there are few signs of recovery. Of the 12 Federal Reserve districts, only Dallas (covering Texas and parts of Louisiana and New Mexico) re
Deep, Deep Geothermal Runs Into Trouble
On paper, at least, "enhanced" geothermal is an incredibly alluring concept. The idea is to bore down, really deep down into the Earth's crust—say, 12,000 feet below the surface—and then pump water through the cracks in the hot bedrock, creating steam to generate electricity.
Failure of Leadership
Last week, the White House released a list of recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States government can afford a civilian. Among the 16 awardees are truly great figures: breast cancer philanthropist Nancy Goodman Brinker, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Execution Without Conviction
On a Wednesday night in San Francisco, opening night, in a theater no more than half full, the truth was as inescapable as rain at a picnic. Johnny Depp just wasn’t cutting it. He wasn’t even making the attempt. Once again, Michael Mann had poured his nearly liquid talent over a gangster picture without ever thinking to ask himself why. That oddly vague title Public Enemies--why isn’t it called Johnny D. or just Dillinger?--was turning into a startlingly detached and affectless movie.
