– by New Deal democrat Part 1 The decline in prime age labor force participation: the smoking gun (part 2 of 2); comparing June Cleaver and Roseanne Conner I recently wrote about the compelling evidence that the biggest reason for the decline in the prime working age labor participation rate was the “child care cost […]
Brad DeLong talks about how other economists view Fed interest rate policies as “price controls”. Then he makes a comparison to the present situation with on an example of a “price floor” in agricultural products. But are low interest rates a price floor or a price ceiling? If you think that interest rates need to […]
The European Commission decided two of its major tax subsidy cases on Wednesday, October 21, and the rulings could not have been worse for Starbucks and Fiat (h/t Chillin’ Competition). These cases can be seen as a barometer of what is to come in the legally similar but much larger case of Apple, where potentially […]
With the earlier discussion of investments I thought a chart would be of interest. As you can see, investments grew until the Republicans started cutting taxes, supposedly to increase investments. (Cutting taxes to grow investments)
Should the Fed raise the base interest rate? They really shouldn’t at this point. Will they? They probably will because they still see years of growth. I do not see years of growth ahead… Let me explain. Almost one year ago I wrote that capacity utilization would start falling. (link) It has fallen since that […]
Recently a very old debate among macroeconomists has been reopened (this happens from time to time). Paul Romer decided to discuss a key conference held in 1978 (yes really). Some (including me) think that’s about when the profession took a wrong turn largely following Robert Lucas. But in the discussion until about yesterday, it was […]
In my last post I pointed out that over the last half century, every time the year-over-year change in Real Household Net Worth went negative (real household wealth decreased), a recession had either started, or was about to. (One bare exception: a tiny decline in Q4 2011, which looks rather like turbulence following The Big Whatever.) […]
The recent stock market fall appears to be in reaction to weakness in foreign economies, not domestic developments in the US. One measure to watch is world trade. from December to May world trade volume fell -3.4%. Interestingly, in the first five months of the 1971 decline trade fell -3.5%, essentially the same […]
Simon Wren-Lewis takes a look back to the 60s and 70s…”The reason I write about this now is that I’m in the process of finishing a paper on the knowledge transmission mechanism and the 2010 switch to austerity, and I wanted to look back at previous macroeconomic crises.” Robert Waldmann is part of this post. The […]
Update: some guy named Krugman suggests that I am not totally off base here. The Disappearing Entitlements Crisis I hear he has an audience. Update two: Social; Security Defender Archive docs and spreadsheets Update(From main Angry Bear page you may need to click ‘Read More’ to see Charts) http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/pdf/tr09summary.pdf http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/ http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/ 2009: Medicare Unsustainable. From […]