Foxconn is flailing in Wisconsin (Insert your joke here.) In what may end up as the biggest economic development failure in U.S. history, Foxconn announced Wednesday that its $10 billion Wisconsin factory will not be a factory. Instead, the company says, it will still create 13,000 jobs, but these will be research jobs rather than manufacturing ones. […]
A note on pending home sales and construction employment The NAR reported that pending home sales declined -2.2% m/m in December. Since this is based on contract signings, it suggests that *existing* home sales will continue to decline for the next month or two. A few commentators have expressed surprise at the negative number, since mortgage […]
Flying blind: a note on the long leading forecast for the second half of 2019 We are still “flying blind” on some important economic data, most notably housing permits, starts, and sales, and GDP. As of this morning, neither the Commerce Department nor its Census Bureau have indicated when these reports will be released, although […]
Robert H. Nelson Dies: Religion And Economics Robert H. Nelson of the University of Maryland Public Policy Department died at age 74 on Dec. 15 while attending a conference in Helsinki, Finland. He was the leading economist writing about the relationship between religion and economics, notably in three books: Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological […]
The Two Percent Solution: Warren and the Stochastic Jubilee Wait long enough, and great ideas come back around, although not necessarily wearing the same garb. Elizabeth Warren has just come out for a 2% wealth tax (above $50 million).* But this is simply an annualized version of my lump sum stochastic jubilee. What’s the advantage of redistributing the […]
by Joseph Joyce Global Firms, National Policies Studies of international transactions often assume that national economies function as separate “islands” or “planets.” Each has its own markets and currency, and international trade and finance occurs when the residents of one economy exchange goods and services or financial assets with those of another. The balance of […]
Two economic notes on the shutdown The government shutdown is the economic equivalent of sustaining -800,000, or -0.5%, layoffs. The last time we saw that was in the Panic of 2008. So needless to say, it is very surprising that last week saw fewer official layoffs than at any time since November 1969. On a […]
The Nobel Economists Petitiion on Carbon Tax And Dividend Plan As many now know, a large group of prominent economists, led by a large group of Nobel Prize winners, has published a petition in the Wall Street Journal. This petition declares the idea of putting a tax on carbon and then returning the receipts from […]
Weirdly Non-Monotonic Yield Curves This is a situation that may be on the verge of disappearing and more or less normalizing, but over the last couple of months US bond markets have exhibited a weird phenomenon of non-monotonicity. It has been even weirder than what we saw during the period of negative nominal interest rates, […]
(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Rare Yglesias Google Fail (Most boring title after “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” but I couldn’t resist) Web savvy ultra wonk Matthew Yglesias wrote “There’s no polling on specific brackets or exactly who counts as rich that I can find,” Matty just google [income to be rich poll]. Jeez. Americans have varying ideas of how much […]