By Steve Roth (reposted) How Amazon’s Accounting Makes Rich People’s Income Invisible Increasingly, businesses don’t generate profits. They generate capital gains. It’s fiendishly clever. Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company […]
by Joseph Joyce After the Global Financial Crisis: Are We Safe Now? A decade after the global financial crisis the global economy seems (finally) to be enjoying a robust recovery. Economic growth is widespread and includes increased expenditures on investment, a sign that business firms expect continuing demand for their products. With the crisis finally […]
I do not understand the silence of the Democrats when it comes to dealing with the issues of this country such as student debt, the attacks by Trump and Republicans on the ACA, the Republican and Trump tax reform plan giving $billions to the 1% of the taxpayers making greater than $500,000 annually, the more […]
Minority unemployment: progress vs. prejudice On this Martin Luther King Day, let’s take a look at minority unemployment. This got a little attention earlier this month when the December jobs report showed the smallest gap ever between the unemployment rates of blacks and whites. So let’s start by confirming the good news. Indeed last month […]
Are Voters In Nations With A Poland Problem Especially Sophisticated? The argument here is that a nation with a Poland problem has a disconnect between its economic conditions and its political outcomes. It could be argued that in such a case the voters of that nation may realize that elected leaders (especially presidents in the […]
Jason Schwartz buries the lede in this genuinely alarming article in Politico “Study: Americans view media negatively, can’t agree on meaning of ‘fake news’” I attempt to excavate it. The study — the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media and Democracy, based on mailed-in responses from more than 19,000 Americans age 18 or older […]
Real wages in 2017 Now that we have the report on consumer prices for December, let’s take a look at what happened with real wages in 2017. Consumer prices increased +0.1% in December, and wages for non-managerial workers rose 0.3%, This for that month the average worker earned 0.2% more. For the year, the nominal […]
Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions. Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on […]