The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days. Today, “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as “the last adult in the room” among the Trump national security team, announced […]
The US economy did not boom in 2018 At the beginning of each year, I try to identify economic series that I think will be most important in the next 12 months. This year I asked: Is the US economy going to enter a Boom in 2018? There is no standard definition of a Boom. But […]
by New Deal democrat The Transportation Slowdown Well over 100 years ago, Charles Dow (he of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) posited a theory that industrial and transportation stock prices should move in tandem. Why? Because everything that factories produced had to be transported to market for delivery. So it is of interest that FedEx said […]
“WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary 2018, Donald J. Trump announced on Thursday that he had been named Man of the Year by the terrorist organization known as ISIS. Trump made the announcement after receiving the news from the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Trump called ‘a terrific, fabulous guy.’ ‘I got along […]
Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”. Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and […]
Trump is blaming the Fed for the recent poor stock market performance. For once, he may be right. The recent market plunge took the stock market PE from the top of my fair value band through the bottom. The last observation is the 14 December close. The fitted PE has is a function of both […]
The most recent year for reported year-round earnings data available for full-time workers revealed the gender earnings gap to be 20 percent between men and women or said a different way women earned 20 percent less than men (Hegewisch 2018). The earnings gap between women and men has been measured (in the past) by taking […]
Rah Rah Economics Greg Mankiw read Trumponics by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore so we don’t have to: When economists write, they can decide among three possible voices to convey their message. The choice is crucial, because it affects how readers receive their work. The first voice might be called the textbook authority. Here, economists act as ambassadors […]