Punctuation And The Second Amendment For most of American history since the Second Amendment was adopted the courts interpreted it as tying the second portion of the amendment to the first part of it. Thus the “right to bear arms” was tied to the need to establish a “well-regulated militia.” The “state” was seen as […]
Expanding BRICS? Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping has called for the BRICS group to expand to include Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Argentina, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The original group, suggested by the research department at Goldman Sachs in 2001 as a group to leading future world economic growth was Brazil, Russia, India, and […]
What Is The Worst Part Of The Current Inflation In the US we may have seen the peak of overall inflation, with the annualized CPI rate increasing at 8.3% in April, down from 8.5% in March, the highest rate of increase in 40 years. The issue has become the reported top concern of the US […]
The Malthusianism Of Benjamin Franklin And The Abortion Issue, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser Thomas Robert Malthus may well have been the least favorite economist of Karl Marx. Basically, Marx did not like him because he saw Malthus as blaming poverty on the poor themselves, their inevitable sinfulness that led them to constantly reproduce themselves excessively when […]
The Passing Of Axel Leijonhufvud On May 5, Swedish economist Axel Leijonhufvud died at age 88. I only met him once when he attended a seminar I gave in Trento, Italy a decade ago. I always admired his work and felt lots of sympathy with it, and I think he liked what I had to […]
Major Economic Confusion Anybody confused by recent economic reports is not alone. The BEA has just reported a totally unexpected decline in real GDP for the first quarter of a 1.4% annual rate. At the same time layoffs have reached a half century low and employment continues to rise. How can we have an apparently […]
You’re Fired! No, I quit! So, Russia has stopped selling natural gas to Bulgaria and Poland because they refuse to pay for it in rubles, but they both say that they do not want Russian natural gas anyway! Barkley Rosser
(Dan here….late to Angry Bear from Econospeak) by Barkley Rosser Happy Earth Day! Yes, today is the 53rd Earth Day. I participated in the first one when it was held in Madison, Wisconsin on April 22, 1970, just as the environmental movement was really getting going. There were observances elsewhere around the US, but […]
Asymmetric Whining This is not news, but yet again we see the old phenomenon of people whining a lot when something gets worse but then saying nothing when it gets better. The latest example of that involves gasoline prices. They were rising and got into the range of near-real highs seen in times like 2008, […]
Conventional Macroeconomics Rears Its Head It is always annoying to have to admit one has been wrong. But I was among those who a year ago or so was going along with those who argued inflation was transitory and the rate would probably come down later in the year. The annoying Larry Summers, along with […]