A US economic Boom in 2018? For the last several years, I have tried to identify several graphs that most bear watching over the ensuing 12 months. This year, in addition to watching bond yields like everybody else, the data that most bears watching, it seems to me, can be summed up in the question: […]
From the World Economic Forum: Kim Kardashian is an unlikely champion of statistics, but a tweet from the reality TV star in January 2017 contained a startling figure that has been named International Statistic of the Year. She shared a table showing a range of violent or unexpected ways people meet their deaths annually in […]
This column was written February 16, 2016 by Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe and is entitled; “The man who didn’t want to be president.” It was referenced in another column by Jeff Jacoby called “The Great I Am“. After hearing Trump’s “Like, being really smart” and a “stable genius” remarks, this column “kind of […]
How Trump Killed The Anti-Government Protests In Iran By very strongly and publicly supporting them and dragging the matter to the UN Security Council Of course, his supporters have been praising his “strong action” in comparison with Obama’s quiet approach to the 2009 demonstrations, meant to reduce accusations of the demonstraters being US pawns. Those […]
by Steven Roth “In the Beginning…Was the Unit of Account” – Twelve Myths About Money November 19th, 2017 Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with […]
I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about PPACA (aka, Obamacare) and its effects. It hasn’t been something that has interested me a great deal until the last week or so, so I am approaching this from a position of ignorance. But I have been reading through as much material as I can find. […]
Devin Smioth at New Economic Perspective points us to ‘where does the money go?”: After President Trump signed the GOP tax plan into law, some of the bill’s corporate beneficiaries have offered workers minor bonuses. But NEP’s Bill Black says they’re keeping most of the money for themselves — and starting a new global race […]
Support the Census The alarm has been sounded that Trump’s census apparatchiks are planning to include a citizenship question in the short form that will be used to generate the full count in 2020. This count, mandated by the constitution and conducted every ten years, is the basis for voting district apportionment and formulas for allocating […]
December jobs report: late cycle mediocre growth reasserts itself HEADLINES: +143,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate rose +0.1% from 8.0% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: rose +43,000 from […]