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

Pensions, Social Security

Holiday present for you via Congress and the Cromnibus. Tucked into the massive spending bill Congress passed this weekend was legislation that reversed 40 years of federal law protecting retirees’ pensions.  The change will allow benefit cuts for up to 10 million workers, many of them part of a shrinking middle-class workforce in businesses such […]

G and GDP during the current recovery

(Dan here update…other posts by Robert Waldmann on the issues can be found here, here, here, and here.) G and GDP during the current recovery update Stephen Williamson asks “Where’s the multiplier” (I have read only the title not the post). Since I regressed rates of growth on rates of growth, my coefficient of grGDP on grG = 0.339 […]

On Smith On Cochrane On Keynesians

Noah Smith has an excellent post which is very critical of something John Cochrane wrote. I added a couple more criticisms in comments Your post is very good as usual. I’d add a couple of things. Cochrane wrote “With the 2013 sequester, Keynesians warned that reduced spending and the end of 99-week unemployment benefits would […]

Investment and Interest Rates III What Taylor Rule ?

This is getting out of hand. A recent post received too many high quality comments. I discuss the discussion some here. The general view expressed in the discussion is that it sure looks as if non residential fixed capital investment as a percent of GDP expressed (nrfinvgdp) and nominal interest rates are positively correlated, because […]

Investment and Interest Rates II

In the post below, I discuss a very strong correlation in the data which surprised me — a high ratio non residential fixed capital investment to GDP is correlated with high nominal interest rates on corporate bonds. I think the discussion in comments was very interesting and I have promised to pull back 2 comments […]

Investment and Interest Rates

In a recent post, I noted that actual non-residential fixed capital investment doesn’t show the pattern one would expect based on optimizing models at all. Ugh that sentence was convoluted and so is the post it describes. In fact, the puzzling pattern is really very simple. Non residential fixed capital investment (nrfinv) is high when […]

Eleven richest Americans have all received government subsidies

A new report by Good Jobs First shows how the very wealthy in America have benefited from government subsidies as one element in building their fortunes. According to the study, the 11 richest Americans, and 23 of the 25 richest, all have significant ownership in companies that have received at least $1 million in investment […]