From the Financial Times: US expects Chinese currency revaluation The Bush administration has told key senators that it expects China to revalue its currency in August ahead of a planned visit to Washington by President Hu Jintao in September, according to people familiar with the matter. Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham, co-sponsors of a […]
The BLS released the June report of the Producer Price Index this morning. It confirms what yesterday’s CPI report suggested: inflation in the US seems to have peaked earlier this year (at least for the time being), and may in fact be falling. From the report: The Producer Price Index for Finished Goods showed no […]
While I had promised not to say anything more, NRO’s oped sort of speaks for itself: What we know so far is far from damning. Then there are these tidbits from The Corner: KLo: Remember Sandy Burgular? I remain more concerned about the near-non-scandal of a former national-security adviser mishandling and destroying classified docs than […]
A paper on the labor market by Katharine Bradbury was forwarded to me by Rex Nutting. His article and her paper are both worth the read.
John Tamny argues that redistributing wealth is per se a reduction in savings: Furthermore, it’s not just morally wrong for the government to use the estate tax to redistribute wealth, it’s also bad economic policy. Wealth by definition is savings. When savings are confiscated for government use, entrepreneurial opportunities in need of capital go wanting […]
The latest White House claims about the budget has made Kash one Angry Bear for good reason. Rather than looking at the recent modest increase in tax revenues (from a rather depressed level), let’s focus on real GDP (figures in 2000$ on an annualized basis) in 2005Q1 ($11096.2 billion) versus where it was in 2000Q4 […]
Today’s release of the Consumer Price Inflation report indicated that, between May and June, the changes in the prices of all the goods and services that consumers typically buy averaged out to exactly zero. Energy prices fell in June, ofsetting slightly higher average prices in non-energy goods. The 12-month inflation rate in core (i.e. excluding […]
The release of the Mid-Session Review of the 2006 budget by the White House today was accompanied by a press release full of dubious claims. Each point in the press release contained its own misleading or incorrect spin on the budget. CLAIM #1: “The Improved Fiscal Outlook Is Directly Tied To The Strength Of The […]
The Bush administration has spent much of the past two days claiming that the tax cuts are responsible for the recent surge in government revenues. But this is nonsense. The fact that government tax collections are rising during a time of economic growth is, at the very least, unsurprising. If the White House wants to […]
While it has been a while, let me start by thanking Kash for his post on the CNOOC bid to buy Unocal as well as his various posts that discuss the benefits of free trade. The NRO has even featured very good defenses of free trade from William Buckley and Bruce Bartlett. I was hoping […]