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profjaparker.bsky.social
Economist. Evidence-based economics and finance, humor, and frustration with extremism and divisiveness. http://mitmgmtfaculty.mit.edu/japarker/ to verify that this is me.
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Balance of payments accounting question about N Korea: Is the capital inflow of crypto to N.Korea from cybercrime like $1.5bn Coinbase hack offset be an export of hacking services in current account? Is that its biggest export?

Thank you to everyone who came and who spoke at the MIT fintech conference 2025. Here I am with Lisa (Fidelity), Felix (Arta Finance), and Zhi (Vanguard). Great AI & wealth management insights from them, and Dan and Vanu. Come next year for fintech fest! (And Feb in Boston!)

LOL. Coinbase doesn’t manage what even the smallest neighborhood savings and loan bank gets right. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/t...

The taxpayer is going to pay the damages for so many lawsuits for so many years to come, for data breaches, wrongly terminated employees, violated contracts. The DOGE dividend checks will be higher tax bills.

Coinbase says that the SEC has agreed to drop the enforcement case against the company. It only cost them $75 million in political contributions.

New hotel alert!!

Oof. @theonion.com going hard.

Update: the one “strongly agree” was a sign error/typo.

Everyone who knows anything about finance or government budgeting knows that a crypto reserve fund is an extremely bad idea

Who are these secret DOGE workers, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely?

Yup, Democrats are still re-arranging the deck chairs while the Republicans are happily flooding the lower decks.

How is it that we aren’t all referring to the kids carrying out a coup against the American constitution and way of life as…Muskovites?

The lure of Elon’s alternate reality for his followers is so powerful that he will tell them that pulling books off shelves, deleting words from government websites, and banning programs for their kids based on words they used is all part of fighting back against censorship. And they just let him

A looong first thread on first-order issues on solution methods for HA macro models.

In 2020, maybe it was only partly the pandemic . . .

Thread of my own work that has used data from Department of Education and columns that have focused on research funded by them 1/N Inequality in college graduation rates Uses data from Education Longitudinal Study, conducted by Department of Education www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/u...

Man our college days had great music and a good play list makes me feel

With Treasury payment system "mistakenly" being handed to one person by DOGE (according to DOGE) and DOGE now going to the IRS, you might be interested in reading about tax privacy. A nice JEP piece on should taxes be public? www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?r...

Incredible.

Instead of soundbites and handing the US Treasury payments system to the wrong person "by mistake," the most critically important area in need of regulatory reform is permitting. We do not now efficiently permit building. Here is a GREAT primer on this important topic: www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

The courts get to weigh in on privacy and whether congress controls the purse strings . . .

Has the rise in the share of micro-econometrics across all econ journals, raises the share in the JEP? Yes it has. And from that, can we identify the causal effect on your applied micro work? Yes, but only from an intent-to-treat estimator unless you all read it!

The Winter JEP is out! Skip the lines at your local bookstore, and view it online! For thinking about entitlement reform, we have a really valuable symposium of facts about the US safety net. Stay informed.

Great news that DOGE discovered UI fraud during the pandemic — it means they are finally reading public government reports!!

Wouldn’t have happened if we still had 2003 Tesla Musk. Instead we only have 2022 Twitter Musk who, yeah, can’t create a webpage . . .

If we’re renaming bodies of water based on petty grievances, I propose that this be renamed the Kendrick Lamar passage.

Cambridge . . . MA? Are you sure? Unbelievable. Seriously, credit where credit is due. Cambridge government does not like high price of housing, so they’re allowing building. Already got a lot of new 5-6 story housing blocks by Alewife and high-rises in East Cambridge. Nicely done, Cambridge.

Trumpery of this admin looking more dodgy than the last (just too aptly named to resist)

What do you think, does DOGE destroy the materials or break the law?

If true, quite damning level of corruption

Economists again know what they are talking about. Tariffs, policy uncertainty, lack of law and order, all bad for the economy.

Much bigger news that employment report. And really bad. Expectation of tariffs or tariff chaos? FTPL from rise in expected deficits? Extrapolation from price of eggs?

What Bill Simmons is to the NBA, @matt-levine.bsky.social is to finance. Thoughtful, insightful, informative, and above all, fun. Congrats on ten years doing Money Stuff.

@elonmusk’s LARPing Government Agency DOGE is looking like it’s going to increase the deficit and cost taxpayers billions in damage , interest, penalties, and legal costs.

For the record, the correct response to this in the UK at least is always: "I believe that doing this would potentially represent a significant data breach and break the law. I'll need a letter from the legal department confirming it isn't, first."

New and important: we built a federal expenditure tracker. All expenditure line items that are available on the Daily Treasury Statement. USAID was zeroed out on 1/28 and has been at zero ever since. www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin... #EconSky

Once again, The Onion delivers

JPMorgan nails today’s vibes least.

The man who’s rocket just exploded over south Florida in spectacular fashion, who had the FAA head removed b/c he dared to be concerned about his safety practices, who is a little too cozy w/ China will now have unfettered access to confidential Treasury payment systems…what could go wrong?

Tricks to get around economic laws - If deposits are screened for money laundering, make it a mortgage payment - If advanced notice is required to sell stock, announce sale & don’t cancel to sell w/ no notice - Can’t take bribes? Have them generously settle lawsuits or overpay for junk like memecoin

Keeping in mind that this is Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO), much of this makes good sense: darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-...

WSJ edit page lauds...wait for it....Elizabeth Warren! "We never thought we’d hear this, but Ms. Warren has an excellent point that Mr. Kennedy, as HHS Secretary, could have the ability to “kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it.” www.wsj.com/opinion/rfk-...

Happy year of the snake!

I highly recommend — I was a CBO intern after junior year of college. You support applied social science in government and you learn about economic policy.

This figure on the left was just circulating on another social media site, and made me post this figure on the right. People believe in different models of the world, and infer different things from the same information, and both report and act on their beliefs. mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/d...