Source: www.boston.com

Today is Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Good Friday is part of Holy Week, a series of religious holidays and observations commemorating the last week of the earthly life of Jesus Christ and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

• Why Are Fewer and Fewer U.S. Employees Satisfied With Their Jobs? — HBS Working Knowledge

Source: hbswk.hbs.edu

With the increasing emphasis by business organizations on ‘green’ initiatives for sustainability, maybe we are overlooking ways to improve the ‘sustainability’ of workers, too, says HBS professor Jim Heskett .

• Robert Barro | FiveBooks

Source: five-books.com

The Lessons of the Great Depression There’s a strong tendency for the economy to recover on its own. A year ago governments saved their biggest banks from collapse, but now they are wondering how big really is too big.

• John Steele Gordon: As Peaceful as a Tea Party – WSJ.com

Source: online.wsj.com

In The Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon writes that the only person arrested in recent days for threatening violence against a politician targeted Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.

• Stumbling in the Dark

Source: www.project-syndicate.org

“At the stroke of 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, nearly a billion people in more than 120 countries demonstrated their desire to do something about global warming by switching off their lights for an hour. But the main thing that anyone accomplished by turning off the lights at nighttime for an hour was to make it harder to see”, says Bjørn Lomborg, who is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.    

The Permanent Mortgage Crisis – WSJ.com Source: online.wsj.com The Wall Street Journal: One more housing bailout to prolong the market agony.

America’s Precarious Net Position — The American, A Magazine of Ideas Source: www.american.com Our financial future is darker than generally expressed through deficit numbers—way darker.

• Daniel Henninger: Would the Founding Founders Love ObamaCare? – WSJ.com

Source: online.wsj.com

Daniel Henninger writes in The Wall Street Journal that the resistance to ObamaCare is about a lot more than the 10th Amendment.

• Inflation: ‘Financial Death by a Thousand Cuts’ – Knowledge@Wharton

Source: knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

According to Wharton insurance and risk management professor Kent Smetters, inflation “destroys the value [of investments] gradually by eroding real returns over time.”

Global Warming

• Kill Oil, by Peter Huber

Wall Street Journal: “A carbon strategy the world can afford.”

Health Care Reform

• Congress Veers Left on Health Care, by Kim Strassel
• Obama, Too Subtle to Lie, Misleads on Health Reform, by Charles Krauthammer

Washington Post: “You lie? No. Barack Obama doesn’t lie. He’s too subtle for that. He . . . well, you judge.”

• Mandatory Insurance Is Unconstitutional, by David Rivkin and Lee Casey

Wall Street Journal: “Why an individual mandate could be struck down by the courts.”

Politics

• No, It’s Not About Race, by David Brooks

New York Times : “The backlash against President Obama is the latest iteration of a populist tendency against money being siphoned off by condescending elites and going to those who do not work.”

Behavioral Economics

• The Devil Wears Fake Prada, by Alex Tabarrok

Energy

• Energy ‘Sprawl’ and the Green Economy, by Lamar Alexander

Wall Street Journal: “We’re about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it.”

Financial Crisis

• The Stimulus Didn’t Work, by John Cogan, John Taylor and Volker Wieland

Wall Street Journal: “The data show government transfers and rebates have not increased consumption at all.”

Health Care Reform

• CBO on the Baucus Plan, by Greg Mankiw
• Competition and Concentration in Health Insurance, by Alex Tabarrok
• How Much Does the Baucus Bill Cost?, by Donald Marron
• More Government Health Care Means A Smaller U.S. Military, by Greg Zerzan

Religion

• The Right Way to Pray?, by Zev Chafets

New York Times: “Americans aren’t sure they know how to talk to God. Fortunately, there is plenty of instruction available.”

Science

• Are Your Friends Making You Fat?, by Clive Thompson

New York Times: “Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler say your friends — and even your friends’ friends — can make you quit smoking, eat too much or get happy. A look inside the emerging science of social contagion.”

Economics

• NY Times vividly admits that min wage causes unemployment, and gov is to blame, by Casey Mulligan

Professor Mulligan notes, “This article explains how NY schools are required to hire from a pool of senior teachers who must be paid more than entry level teachers. In effect, schools are required to pay more than the market clearing wage. The result: teachers are unemployed and classes go without teachers.”

• An Echo Chamber of Boom and Bust, by Robert Shiller

New York Times: “How a worldwide “social epidemic” of ideas is supporting renewed confidence in the economy.”

Energy Policy

• Why Oil Still Has a Future, by Daniel Yergin

Wall Street Journal: “The Obama administration is using its brass knuckles to support Latin American thugs.”

Foreign Policy

• Obama vs. Honduran Democracy, by Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Wall Street Journal: “Demand in the developing world trumps new technology.”

Health Care Reform

• Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care, by Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband

Wall Street Journal: “Current congressional proposals would significantly change your relationship with your doctor.”

• Who should decide whether additional medical care is worth the cost? (part 2), by Keith Hennessey (Click here for part 1).

Energy Economics

• ‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy, by Micheal Lynch
  New York Times: “A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about the theory of peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry operates.”

Game Theory

• Can a rational person believe in miracles?, by Presh Talwalkar
  Mr. Talwalkar applies Bayes Theorem to assess Francis Collins’ argument (put forth in his book The Language of God) that rational people can believe in miracles.

Health Care Reform

• In Defense of the Public Option, by Alex Tabarrok
  Professor Tabarrok argues that “…health insurance reform will increase the market power of insurance firms and drive up prices.  In this scenario, the public option at least has a raison d’etre, although whether it actually fulfills it’s purpose is an open question.”

Politics

• Obama’s Summer of Discontent, by Fouad Ajami
  Professor Ajami’s historical references are quite apropos, and I even learned about an interesting French phrase from reading this article: lèse-majesté. According to Wikipedia, “…lèse-majesté is the crime of violating majesty, an offense against the dignity of a reigning sovereign or against a state.”
• Saving the Obama Presidency, by William McGurn
  Mr. McGurn draws some interesting (although perhaps somewhat speculative) parallels between August 2009 and August 1994. August 1994 marked a major turning point for the Clinton presidency, in the sense that in the wake of the failure of the so-called “HillaryCare” initiative, President Clinton “freed” himself from his party’s left wing and returned to the centrist themes on which he had originally campaigned. McGurn’s question is whether President Obama will follow President Clinton’s example, thereby “saving” his presidency.

Given this substantial (nearly 16%) drop in prices of gasoline futures contracts, current pump prices (averaging nationally more than $4 per gallon, and around $3.90-$3.95 in Texas) are not sustainable. Barring a high severity natural or man-made catastrophe, pump prices have nowhere to go but down. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for these lower prices to make their way through the supply chain.

No wonder the US domestic airline industry is losing money hand over fist. The industry’s CEO’s apparently must not comprehend the most rudimentary economic principles which underlie global energy markets. I will be the first to admit that I am definitely not a particularly big fan of market volatility; e.g., I haven’t particularly enjoy watching my retirement assets go bungee jumping as they have been prone to do recently. I guess that I could blame all the evil short sellers for driving down the prices of my favorite stocks, but perhaps the real problem is that I am not that good of an investment analyst. I guess that I have been operating under the apparently mistaken impression for the better part of my adult life that the whole point of going long, going short, and/or implementing various trading strategies using derivative securities such as options and futures contracts is that innovations such as these facilitate price discovery and help ensure that markets allocate resources to their most highly valued uses. I think that the energy markets are telling these executives that their business models are broken and that they better start thinking of ways to restructure themselves so that they and their firms can live another day, week, month, year, decade or whatever. The worst thing we can do as a society is to continue to shield the airline industry from the consequences of continuing to pursue unsustainable business models.

I also find it very curious that the CEO for Southwest Airlines is one of the signatories on this “open letter”, since Southwest Airlines has been making money hand over fist from hedging their energy exposures in the futures markets (according to a July 1, 2008 Associated Press story entitled “Airlines try to hedge against soaring fuel costs”, hedging (e.g., by purchasing futures contracts) has saved Southwest $3.5 billion since 1999). I guess when an airline takes positions in energy-related derivative securities, that’s okay; it’s just wrong for you or me or some other so-called “oil speculator” to do the same.