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 […]
by Steven Roth “In the Beginning…Was the Unit of Account” – Twelve Myths About Money November 19th, 2017 Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with […]
Devin Smioth at New Economic Perspective points us to ‘where does the money go?”: After President Trump signed the GOP tax plan into law, some of the bill’s corporate beneficiaries have offered workers minor bonuses. But NEP’s Bill Black says they’re keeping most of the money for themselves — and starting a new global race […]
Support the Census The alarm has been sounded that Trump’s census apparatchiks are planning to include a citizenship question in the short form that will be used to generate the full count in 2020. This count, mandated by the constitution and conducted every ten years, is the basis for voting district apportionment and formulas for allocating […]
Trump celebrates his (very expensive) tax cuts for himself and his rich golfing buddies Remember how Trump sold the Republicans’ $1.5 trillion-deficit-creating tax cut plan as a boon for the middle class that was going to create jobs and raise wages? That was in September, when he told congressional lawmakers at the White House that […]
By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Today’s mountains of wealth throttle the very engine of wealth creation itself. Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to […]
This National Bureau of Economic research paper is behind a paywall, but the premise is up for discussion: This Paper challenges two widely held views: first that trade performance has been the primary reason for the declining share of manufacturing employment in the United States and other industrial economies, and second that recent productivity growth […]