Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Extending the preliminary circular flow model with labor share

I want to expand on the last post where a simplified circular flow model was given incorporating labor share of income. That circular flow did not include sectors for a government nor foreign markets. I now will expand that model to include those sectors and more. Extended circular flow for labor share Here is the […]

Profitless stocks, labor, and higher stock prices

Yves Smith gives Angry Bear Edward Lambert a nod in Profitless stocks, Underinvestment, and the cannibalization of labor, and levitating stock prices. As this trend has accelerated, we’ve also seen falling levels of corporate investment. As I noted in a 2005 article, companies were net savers, which was unheard of at any time other than in […]

Ricardo and his followers and Krugman

Paul Krugman points to Angry Bear Robert Waldmann in two separate posts this week here and here. by Robert Waldmann “Ricardo offers us the supreme intellectual achievement, unattainable by weaker spirits, of adopting a hypothetical world remote from experience as though it were the world of experience and then living in it consistently. With most […]

Fast-Food Fight….reader Denis offers some pointers

Reader Denis Drew writes (lifted from comments) : The bottom 50% of America’s workforce now takes 12% of overall income. If the federal minimum wage is raised to $15/hr that will add 3.6% direct inflation. $15/hr being today’s median wage, half the workforce, 70 million employees receiving an average $8,000/yr raise would add $560 billion […]

The NSA is Snitching On You to the Cops

From the Huffington Post comes a note on who else is using NSA data in some fashion: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases […]

The Right’s Goal–end the one tax expenditure that truly aids poor working families

by Linda Beale The Right’s Goal–end the one tax expenditure that truly aids poor working families The Tax Foundation, that propaganda tank that masquerades as a “nonpartisan” “think” tank, is at it again.  Now it’s pushing the right-wing agenda of ending any tax expenditures that redistribute resources down to those in the lower-income distributions. It’s […]

Krugman & Kalecki, “injecting” to escape from a sub-optimal reality

Paul Krugman today wrote that we are in a “Keynesian crisis that calls for Keynesian policies”. Keynesian policies are monetary and fiscal policy to increase demand in the economy. I wrote a response earlier today about an article from Mark Thoma who called for the same Keynesian policies of monetary and fiscal policies to increase […]

Beyond the horse race to lead the FED

Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, offers some thoughts on the FED and its changing role ( re-posted with authors permission, for the complete post go to original): Beyond the horse race to lead the FED …As the horse race for […]

The state as “Market maker”

For a point of view we don’t see much lately: Mariana Mazzucato, a Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, discusses the role of government in innovation and economic growth. In her latest book The Entrepreneurial State she argues that active state investment has been the secret behind most radical innovations, and that this requires economists […]