Frank Ackerman, 1946-2019 The world of economics suffered a sad loss a few days ago (July 15) with the death of Frank Ackerman.  Frank was a mainstay of the activist left within the profession; he was one of the founders of the magazine Dollars and Sense and could always be found at activities of the […]

Mankiw Misrepresents a Story on Senator Sanders Campaign Worker Negotiations Greg Mankiw reads this story and writes: Staffers in the Sanders campaign, who are working on salary, complain that they are paid less than the $15 per hour that Senator Sanders advocates for the minimum wage. So Sanders raises their hourly wage. Does that increase their income? No, […]

Hannity Calls For/Predicts War With Iran OK, sorry if this is just over the top, but this evening Trump’s close pal, Sean Hannity, has gone over the top both predicting and clearly supporting a full blown attack on Iran, “take out all their nuclear facilities.”  Curiously a sign of how over the top this is […]

by New Deal Democrat Weekly Indicators for July 15 – 19 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There were a number a changes among the short leading indicators this week at the margins, in a somewhat surprising direction. Since I’ll be posting my semi-annual updates of my short and long […]

(Dan here… Via Real News Network, Bill Black discusses the what-ifs of President Trump’s policies in a spectacular contrast to current expectations…providing. a jumping off point from what we expect from the way it is framed now. I assume the complex interalationships of the wealthy elites (let us see how the Epstein case unwinds for […]

Eliminate The Debt Ceiling Several days ago in WaPo, Catherine Rampell published a highly reasonable column calling for eliminating the century-old US debt ceiling, something no other nation has ever had, a position supported by a wide array of economists including such a conservative GOP stalwart as the recently deceased Martin Feldstein, a former CEA […]

Fox News Is Calling The Persian Gulf “The Arabian Gulf” Yes.  For centuries throughout the entire world that crucial body of water has been called “the Persian Gulf,” even though in 1935 the nation of Persia changed its named to “Iran.”  I became aware several decades ago when I was in Saudi Arabia that they […]

This is my oldest son the weekend of the Apollo moon landing. The whole country was glued to their TVs that week. Figure 1 The TV was about the state of the art 50 years ago and my brother, the photo journalist, took the photo.  In  the pre-digital era he mostly worked in black and […]