Mark Thoma at MoneyWatch points to : Why income redistribution doesn’t hurt growth, by Mark Thoma: Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” documents the increase in inequality in recent decades, and it has rekindled an old debate about the effects of income redistribution on economic growth. Until recently, most economists believed there’s a trade-off between […]

 Via the IMF comes this interesting note: Managing the revenue from natural resources—what’s a Finance Minister to do? By Sanjeev Gupta and Enrique Flores The Finance Minister answers her mobile. On the line is the Minister of Energy, who informs her that the country has struck oil and that he expects revenues from its sale […]

How people use economic terms mainly as a political stance comes in all levels of expertise and income levels.  And how to combine advocacy and justice, whether from the Koch brothers or Walmart and McDonald’s workers, is often blurred and has only soft edges based on personal context and daily exposure to whatever one thinks […]

Via newsletter from rjs: We’ll include Bill McBride’s graph from his coverage of this report below because it best shows how our trade deficit suddenly spiked over the past 5 months after 2 years of gradual improvement…reading from the top $0 line down, the black graph line tracks our deficit in petroleum trade only in […]

Also via the New York Times comes an article on NSA versus the internet giants like Google. I haven’t a clue (other than skepticism and ‘how does that work?’) as to what it actually means. Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest […]

Via Big Picture, Barry Ritholz points us to discussion on the role of ‘war’ in our economy: Preface: Many Americans – including influential economists and talking heads – still wrongly assume that war is good for the economy. For example, extremely influential economists like Paul Krugman and Martin Feldsteinpromote the myth that war is good […]

Even the big mutual fund giants won’t guarantee the principle in money market funds (the dollar threshold). Now here is an interesting notion for people to think on for a policy occurring in EU policy debates. What would this mean? From the New York Times: First there was ZIRP. Now get ready for NIRP. The first […]