If the Fed raises interest rates and marginal companies are pushed into struggling for survival, is this a bad thing? Won’t we lose jobs? Won’t wages be hurt? Well, the question is… Are the healthier companies (those that can better survive a higher Fed rate) willing to make employees happier? Well, we now have a […]

The Ezra Kleinless wonkblog remains excellent. In particular Matt O’Brien is about as young, smart, witty, and hard working as Klein. However, I think he may not have read everything. He notes that the allegedly reformicon tax plan includes the Bush tax cuts for the rich on steroids. Then he reviews recent, but only recent, […]

The Census Bureau had a press release this morning announcing that nominal retail sales fell -0.6% in February, the third consecutive fall. Wall Street economists,analysts, strategists and managers have been watching these weak retail sales reports and speculating on why the drop in oil prices has not lead to the boost in consumer spending that […]

The Flow of Funds report from the Federal Reserve came out today for the 4th quarter of 2014. Non-financial business debt grew quite fast. “Non-financial business debt rose at an annual rate of 7.2 percent in the fourth quarter, a somewhat larger increase than in the previous quarter. As in recent years, corporate bonds accounted […]

I am trying to think of issues on which there is a marked difference between the views typical of economists and those of non-economists. It is certainly true that non-economists (especially social scientists other than economists) think there are typical economists’ views. These views are held by a solid majority of professors at the University […]

Today, Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who has been talking about challenging Clinton from the left, was repeatedly asked by reporters to comment on Clinton’s emails, and he repeatedly refused. Not because he doesn’t think there are legitimate questions here, but because his advisers say raising them might reflect badly on him: “His advisers say there’s […]

by New Deal democrat Inflation in the 21st century: Oil, not wage growth or unemployment, is the issue This post follows up on my last piece, in which I argued that there are historically non-existent wage or inflationary pressures in the economy, so the notion that the Fed should raise short term rates now to […]

The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, John Williams, gave a presentation on March 5th about the outlook for monetary policy. He basically is easing our understanding towards accepting the rationale for normalizing (raising) nominal interest rates. I personally am in agreement with what he says and how he says it. He […]