Via rjs newletter via Naked Capitalism: “Among its claims: The injection well ban violates the corporation’s rights as a “person” under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments; the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the Contract Clause and Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.” Court Orders Nonprofit Law Firm to Pay $52,000 to […]
Carbon footprint conundrum would be my title. Personal involvement is important (macro is too but not the point here), but this list points to involvements well beyond many our imaginations to implement as individuals. Personal decisions are much harder for the top activities mentioned, and from personal contacts not much on the radar of people’s […]
By Steve Roth (reposted) How Amazon’s Accounting Makes Rich People’s Income Invisible Increasingly, businesses don’t generate profits. They generate capital gains. It’s fiendishly clever. Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company […]
Minority unemployment: progress vs. prejudice On this Martin Luther King Day, let’s take a look at minority unemployment. This got a little attention earlier this month when the December jobs report showed the smallest gap ever between the unemployment rates of blacks and whites. So let’s start by confirming the good news. Indeed last month […]
Real wages in 2017 Now that we have the report on consumer prices for December, let’s take a look at what happened with real wages in 2017. Consumer prices increased +0.1% in December, and wages for non-managerial workers rose 0.3%, This for that month the average worker earned 0.2% more. For the year, the nominal […]
Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions. Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on […]
JOLTS report confirms November payrolls strength I’m changing my presentation of JOLTS data somewhat compared with the last year or two. At this point I’ve pretty much beaten the dead horses of (1) “job openings” are soft and unreliable data, and should be ignored in contrast with the hard “hires” series; and (2) the overall […]
Negative Interest Rates and a Term Structure Puzzle James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending […]
Does the United States Have A “Poland Problem”? It certainly looks like it. Again, for anybody not having seen one of these, a “Poland problem” involves an apparent disconnect between economics and politics, nations with reasonably well performing economies where the populace becomes unhappy and supports opposition, especially “populist” nationalist authoritarian candidates, with 2015 victory […]
By Steve Roth (re posted) Why Economists Don’t Know How to Think about Wealth (or Profits) Until 2006, they quite literally weren’t playing with a full (accounting) deck. Most still aren’t In the next evolution of economics taking shape around us and among us, perhaps no school has been so transformational over recent decades as a loose, worldwide […]