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

As Common as Ditchwater

I would like to draw the readers’ attention to an item I posted yesterday and say a few words about the significance of the discovery mentioned in it. The mock “theory of the Lump of Labour” was invented in 1891 by David Frederick Schloss in an article titled “Why Working-Men Dislike Piece Work.” The Oxford […]

Top 100 Blogs

In the Category of General Blogs or blogs which focus on a variety of topics. These blogs regularly present on a variety of topics and are a great way to start understanding economics or even to keep up with current economic events. – Marginal Revolution – The Big Picture – Calculated Risk – Naked Capitalism […]

A New Model of the Economy Please

Brad DeLong wrote recently concerning the Uncertainty at the Fed… “The heart of the trouble consists in the fact that neither financial-market participants nor, it seems, the Fed itself know the true state of the economy or how best to model it – especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis” (link) It is […]

Subsidy Tracker Reaches Major Milestones

Subsidy Tracker, the free subsidy database created in 2010 by Good Jobs First, has reached major milestones in its coverage of state, local, and federal subsidies. This month’s enhancements to the database bring it to a once-unimaginable 500,000 individual incentive awards with a cumulative nominal subsidy value of $250 billion! That’s starting to add up […]

Refinancing is dead: a generation of Hard Times will continue until secularly real wages improve

New Deal Democrat writing from The Bonddad Blog On Monday I gave what I think is a reasonable roadmap to the next recession. I want to follow up on this a little. The post from nearly 10 years ago was entitled, Are Hard Times Near? The great decline in interest rates is ending.” The theory […]

Why did the Clinton campaign say earlier this month that Trump’s statement that he plans to partially default on the national debt could work? (And, yes, that, as the NYT mentions today, is what the Clinton campaign said.)

Debates have broken out in Mrs. Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters over the best approach to take. Some advisers worry that by running against Mr. Trump as she would a traditional Republican candidate, Mrs. Clinton is actually making the reality­ television star appear more legitimate. This month, when Mr. Trump suggested he would reduce the national debt […]

Attractor State of Productive Capacity is Shifting

What is an attractor state? It is a state around which a dynamic system organizes itself. “Self-organization is the spontaneous often seemingly purposeful formation of spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal structures or functions in systems composed of few or many components. In physics, chemistry and biology self-organization occurs in open systems driven away from thermal equilibrium. The […]

SEC capture…

Yves Smith at NC: The SEC showed its true colors yet again at a panel at Stanford Law School at the end of March, although not as dramatically as last year. In last spring’s SEC panel at Stanford, the then head of examinations, Andrew Bowden, made such fawning remarks about private equity, including repeatedly saying […]