Is the sun setting? On April 22nd, I wrote a comment to a reader of my Effective Demand blog. I said… “My view now is that the Dow Jones will make a publicity effort with hopes to get back up to 16800, then come down from there.” The Dow Jones made it to 16715. Today […]
Update appended. 5/17 at 1:37 p.m. —- I’ve written several times in the last three-plus years about a Supreme Court case called Bond v. U.S. Actually, to be precise, Bond v. U.S. is two Supreme Court cases, although it’s only one lower-court case. This is not unusual, but the case itself is; both the facts and the […]
Fed Treasury Holdings 5-7-2014 The above link should take you to a PDF showing the Fed’s System Open Market Accounts holdings of Treasury Bonds and Notes which the second link will tell you comprise $2.224 trillion of the total $4.017 trillion of SOMA Holdings, with that total including $1.631 trillion of Fannie and Freddie Mac […]
The problem we have in this country is not income inequality. It’s opportunity inequality. — Chris Christie, today And since there’s no causal relationship whatsoever between income inequality and opportunity inequality, this is sure to be a winning political message in 2016. Christie made the comment “at a ‘fiscal summit’ hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which […]
It’s not every day that a law professor has his book quoted by the Supreme Court, and so the University of Baltimore‘s Michael I. Meyerson was understandably intrigued when his 2012 work about the Framers’ views on religion made it into Monday’s decision on public prayer. But the plug from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the […]
by Sandwichman Microfoundations of Inequality and Sabotage “In sum, these models [efficiency wage] provide a new, consistent, and plausible microfoundation for a Keynesian model of the cycle.” — Janet Yellen (1984). Inequality and Sabotage, explored the relationship between Thomas Piketty’s “r > g” inequality and speculated, based on Veblen (1921) and Kalecki (1943), that businesses […]
As I look at different countries for evidence of the Fisher Effect, the thought occurred to look at China. Would the Fisher Effect be discernible since their central bank’s (PBoC) nominal rate is not at the ZLB? It is free to move anyway it chooses. But then one realizes that they hold their PBoC rate […]
It is a common trope among Austerians that the U.S. is passing on unsustainable debt to our children and grandchildren. And certainly there are some scary numbers out there, for example “$17.4 trillion!!” A very real number. But maybe it would be useful to render that number down so as to calculate real incidence of […]
For citizens against the prayers, the decision sets dangerous church-state precedent. For the town of Greece, court’s ruling is a victory for religious freedom. — Brett Harvey, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the town of Greece, in Town of Greece v. Galloway, at the U.S. Supreme Court, writing as a guest in […]