As an uncredentialed observer of the politics of macroeconomic policy, I have often wondered just how transparently cheesy the supposed smart guys will get before someone calls them on it. The answer came yesterday as I looked at this (PDF)
launched by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on behalf of the derivative market's most influential compulsive gamblers. The report—all seven highly academic and technical pages of it—claims that the mild rules proposed by the Dodd-Frank Act will cost between 100,000 and 130,000 American jobs. It's absurd on its face, and Simon Johnson at his blog
and then Andrew Ross Sorkin of the
New York Times
'
DealBook
. He called up the alleged "advisors" of the company—Keybridge Research—that published this laughable lobby effort masquerading as independent research. One of these supposed advisors was the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Sorkin:
Within a few hours, two more of the firm's seven advisors had disappeared from its web site, Sorkin writes:
Those who have
might recall that several respected economists were shown to be hacks who will say or write anything on behalf of the highest bidder. That this is still a revelation to some—two or three decades after it became standard operating procedure in the economics departments of major universities—hints at how deep the rot is. The American Economics Association reportedly is
. Now the amusing part: count the number of times the Keybridge report or its figures are cited by deregulatory congress members and supposedly serious commentators during the next few months. Start right now. The House Financial Services Committee is
.
