Yves Smith asks …I’ll throw it out to you: what do you deem the odds of Euro breakup to be (with “breakup” defined as at least one country exiting the Eurozone) in the next month? In the next six months? And if you think it will come apart, but later, guesstimate how much later and […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Human Capital Edition In the past six weeks I have talked to and with health care executives and practitioners from at least 40 states. All of the conversations have been interesting to say the least. What I hear from the hospital and (integrated) health system levels is the […]
by Mike Kimel The two luckiest people in American politics today are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Each is running against a politician whose accomplishments while an elected head of the executive branch are a disappointment even to most of his own supporters. If they were running against anyone else, they’d probably both go down […]
by Rebecca Wilder Euro Area Inflation: A Very Slow Burn Euro area consumer prices increased at a 2.4% annual pace in May, down 0.2 ppt from the 2.6% pace in April. Core inflation fell to 1.8% in May from 1.9% in April. Headline and core inflation peaked in the fourth quarter of 2011, and disinflation […]
by Kenneth Thomas Guest post: Why the World Should Care About America’s Middle Class Tim Worstall, in his Forbes blog, attacks my series (here and here) on whether globalization is good for America’s middle class. Not on the basis that he disagrees with my conclusion (though he does), but because, he argues, there are much […]
by Kenneth Thomas Guest Post: Is globalization good for America’s middle class? Part 2 In Part 1, I examined what economic theory has to say about the winners and losers from trade. The main conclusion is based on the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem: Because the United States is labor scarce in a global perspective, an expansion of […]
by Rebecca Wilder Euro Area ‘Hard Data’ Catching Up with the ‘Soft Data’ – Industrial Production Euro area industrial production (ex construction) declined 0.8% in the month of April. Across the major sectors, the largest decline occurred in capital goods; however, the trend in consumer and intermediate goods is worse than that of capital goods. […]
Tim Johnson, Democrat of South Dakota, committee leader: “How can a bank take on ‘far too much risk’ if the point of the trades was to reduce risk in the first place? Or was the goal really to make money?” Mr. Johnson said in prepared remarks. “As the saying goes, you can’t have your cake […]