Ex-hurricane trend in September industrial production is positive As I outlined earlier this week, a reasonable temporary workaround for industrial production unaffected by the recent hurricanes is to average the 4 regional Fed surveys, minus Dallas, plus the Chicago PMI. Over the long run, each +5 in the average of the indexes is consistent with […]
Trump’s “Give the Rich a Break” Tax Plan National GOP leaders on Wednesday released a 9-page document that they called a tax “framework” (available here on the Washington Post site) describing in vague terms how they intend to cut taxes for the nation’s wealthiest people while doing very little that serves the government needs. Overall, […]
How I Came To No Longer Be A Kaldorian Economist Yes, for a period of time, according to some sources, I was a member of the “Kaldorian” school of Post Keynesian economic thought, although I had not previously thought of myself as such, indeed, had been unaware that there even was such a school of […]
Wow! Yellin confirms 2% inflation is the Fed’s ceiling You may have already seen this elsewhere, but in case you didn’t, Janet Yellin all but officially confirmed the other day that 2% isn’t in fact the Fed’s target, it’s their ceiling. Per the New York Times: Given that monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation […]
A hurricane workaround for industrial production Last week I mentioned that the regional Fed surveys plus the Chicago PMI can be used as a workaround to account for the effects of hurricanes on Industrial Production. It isn’t pretty and by no means is it perfect, but for the (hopefully only) two or three months that […]
by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes […]
Dan here…Angry Bear Steve Roth’s clear and thorough writing continues…please go to the original for more graphs…I could not include the largest in the Angry Bear format in its proper place. Go straight to read more to view the whole post…. By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity […]
A thought for Sunday: the most important issue in the 2016 election was . . . This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for several months. For a while after the election last year, there was a debate about whether the “economic anxiety” in the (white) working class was the most important factor […]
The asterisk in real median household income This is a follow-up to the post I wrote last week about the latest data on real median household income. One of the things I notes is that “households” includes the millions that are composed of retirees, a burgeoning demographic due both to healthier longevities and the demographics […]
Via the Guardian comes this note from well funded groups: Conservative campaign aims to strike ‘mortal blow’ on government unions ‘A once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left’