Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Privatization

Fear and Loathing On the 17 July 2020, episode of Counterspin, Fair’s Janine Jackson interviewed True North Research’s Lisa Graves about attacks on the US Postal Service. ‘A Combination of Forces Puts Our Postal Service at Grave Risk‘ Jackson leads off talking about the recent appointment of Louis DeJoy, a big Trump donor, to be […]

Catching up with wages, income, and layoffs

Catching up with wages, income, and layoffs Yesterday and today have seen several significant data releases. Let’s catch up. Wages The Employment Cost Index was released for Q2 this morning. This is a particularly important release because unlike the monthly “average hourly wages” number, this report normalizes by job category, e.g., it compares clerks’ wages […]

A Republican Idea for Onshoring Pharmaceutical Intangible Assets

A Republican Idea for Onshoring Pharmaceutical Intangible Assets Alex Parker reports on a proposal from Representative Darin LaHood: As part of the next round of pandemic relief, House Republicans are pushing new incentives for companies to bring home offshore intellectual property — something that they contend could boost job growth but that critics see as another […]

International Factor Payments and the Pandemic

(Dan here…Joseph Joyce writes for Econbrowser) International Factor Payments and the Pandemic I have written a piece on international factor payments (migrants’ remittances, FDI income) and the pandemic for Econbrowser, the widely followed blog of Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin and James Hamilton of the University of California-San Diego. You can find it here: […]

More economic wisdom from the Library of Economics and Liberty

In a post today at Econlib, David Henderson writes: Postscript: There was an unusually high percentage of good comments on my op/ed on the WSJ site. Here’s one I just noticed: In Michigan, our Governor ordered auto insurance companies to issue rebates – due to folks driving less I guess. But amazingly, our Governor who is […]

June durable goods orders continue rebound

June durable goods orders continue rebound Last week I wrote a synopsis of the short leading indicators and what they suggested about the ultimate Presidential election result in November. Basically, they have improved over the last several months and suggested the polls would tighten compared with the present. Among the missing June indicators were durable […]

Managing A Zoom Conference

Managing A Zoom Conference As of the end of this week, I completed chairing the 30th annual international conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences, with 54 participants from around the world.  It basically went well, and it was kind of cool to make introductory remarks at 8 AM during […]

Weekly indicators

by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There was no significant change this week in any of the indicator time frames.  I expect that to change in a hurry once the pain of the ending of the supplemental $600/week unemployment benefits is felt. That was all going to spending, and […]