by Joseph Joyce Global Networks and Financial Instability The ten-year anniversary of the global financial crisis has brought a range of analyses of the current stability of the financial system (see, for example, here). Most agree that the banking sector is more robust now due to increased capital, less leverage, more prudent balance sheets and better […]
Real Military Pay Donald Trump lies about everything including military pay: Trump Brags To Troops About A Fictional Giant Pay Raise He Got Them – The president told military personnel in Iraq that they’ll get a raise of over 10 percent, their first in a decade. But it’s 2.6 percent, and they get a hike every […]
The US Postal Service in a Parallel Universe Imagine that, instead of the dinosaur of a postal service we have today—the product, among other things, of congressional insistence that no government outfit can compete with private business in lucrative new markets—we had an entrepreneurial, innovative public dynamo. In this other universe, the USPS was always […]
by Steven Roth (originally posted at Asymptosis) Actually, Only Banks Print Money I’m thinking this headline will raise some eyebrows in the MMT community. But it’s not really so radical. It’s just using the word money very carefully, as defined here. Starting with the big picture: You can compare the magnitude of these asset-creation mechanisms here. (Hint: […]
Taxes Up 30%! A couple of months ago yours truly complained a bit about some fiscal dishonesty coming from Team Trump: He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same period, we are talking about a 2% real decrease in […]
(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis wrote an excellent retrospective on the career of Paul Ryan‘He was the future of the party’: Ryan’s farewell triggers debate about his legacy They are quite harsh, but not, I think, quite harsh […]
Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”. Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and […]
Rah Rah Economics Greg Mankiw read Trumponics by Art Laffer and Stephen Moore so we don’t have to: When economists write, they can decide among three possible voices to convey their message. The choice is crucial, because it affects how readers receive their work. The first voice might be called the textbook authority. Here, economists act as ambassadors […]
Real retail sales very positive; industrial production decent Real retail sales for November, together with the revisions for October, were very positive. While November sales, both nominally and adjusted for inflation, increased +0.2%, October sales were revised upward to a nominal +1.1%. On an inflation adjusted basis, that translates to +0.8%. As a result, as […]
Real wage growth: November 2018 update Now that November inflation has been reported (as unchanged), let’s update what that means for real wages. Nominally, wages for nonsupervisory workers grew +0.3% in November. With inflation flat, that means real wages also grew +0.3%: Even so, although they are at a new 40 year high, real hourly […]