Is Strengthening Labor Good for Development? Servaas Storm, who’s always worth reading, has posted on the INET website a summary of a new working paper he coauthored. This issue goes way back with me—I first started looking into and writing about the labor rights/wage/trade/development nexus back in the 1980s. Working on my own, I had a lot […]
Gas- and housing-powered inflation mean real wages are going nowhere This morning consumer price inflation for May was reported at +0.2%. YoY inflation was 2.8%. This is tied for the highest in six years (blue): The cause of the increase was primarily twofold — and neither one reflective of wage inflation. First, gas prices have […]
The Singapore Deal I have refused to forecast what two unpredictable leaders will do, and I shall continue that, other than to say I do not believe North Korea will denuclearize. Otherwise, well, the written deal was mostly aspirations while there seem to be disagreements about the verbal deals. DPRK says US has agreed to […]
Update: wholesalers’ sales and inventories — it’s all good Another slow start to the data this week, so let’s take a look at relationship I haven’t updated in awhile. Total sales in the economy are broken up into three categories: manufacturers’, wholesalers’, and retailers’. We’ll get retail sales, the biggest component of the three, later […]
Backstabbing Over Cow What is it with cows? I mean their flatulence does add to global warming, but they seem so benign, chewing their cud while producing milk and meat. Why is it that national leaders get into fits of backstabbing over them, or especially over all that milk they produce? Well, of course, that […]
(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts.) by Robert Waldmann In a generally good article on how Trump got nothing out of Kim in Singapore, David Nakamura, Philip Rucker, Anna Fifield, and Anne Gearan make a false claims “Deals reached between Washington and Pyongyang under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama collapsed after […]
Robert J. Samuelson Also Exaggerates Social Security Problems Not really a surprise, after all, it is Monday, and RJS has been at this for quite a long time at his post at WaPo. But the recent release of the Trustees’ Report has not only gotten the Associated Press all bent out and shrieking “insolvency,” but […]
by Steve Roth What Causes Recessions? A Physicists’ Complex Systems Model I received some very interesting comments from Yaneer Bar-Yam to my recent Evonomics post— “Capital’s Share of Income is Far Higher than You Think.” He pointed me to his very interesting paper, “Preliminary steps toward a universal economic dynamics for monetary and fiscal policy.” I’m using this space to reply […]
The disastrous German Emperor who was a doppelganger to Donald Trump: Kaiser Wilhelm You know the drill. It’s Sunday, so I write about whatever else is on my mind. I am presently reading Miranda Carter’s “George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm,” her 2009 biography of the three grandchildren of Queen Victoria who were respectively, the King of […]
The Wage[s]-Lump Doctrine — still dogma after all these years “The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) […]