In a speech this week, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Charles Evans, made a case for keeping the effective Fed rate low well into the foreseeable future. He concluded… “To summarize, I am very uncomfortable with calls to raise our policy rate sooner than later. I favor delaying liftoff until I […]
Remember Iceland? During the high-flying early 2000s, its three main banks went berserk, paying high interest rates to international investors that accumulated deposits equal to more than 100% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and making loans equal to 980% of GDP. When the collapse came, Iceland took a route not taken by Ireland, […]
Post has been cut-and-paste-typo-corrected. 9/28 at 11:43 a.m. —- There’s a palpable fear amongst Kansans, all across this state, that the America that we love, and cherish, and honor, will not be the same America for our kids and grand kids. And that’s wrong. That’s very wrong. As a result, unfortunately, people are losing faith […]
Brad DeLong has a video discussing Piketty’s book. In the video, the subject of labor share comes up, which has dropped to new lower levels in advanced countries. Robert Solow tries to make an analogy for labor share being an irrelevant factor. So he describes two islands. (36 to 38 minutes in video) and asks […]
I’ve ranted about this phenomenon for a long time: Do Businesses Borrow to Invest in Productive Assets? Quoting JW Mason: “the marginal dollar borrowed by a nonfinancial business in this period was simply handed on to shareholders, without funding any productive expenditure at all.” We Need to Spur Business Investment. Yeah, Right. Quoting Floyd Norris: […]
It all started with an article about a speech by Dallas Fed President, Richard Fisher, in the Business Insider last Friday. Mr. Fisher basically said that wages could start rising once unemployment hits 6.1%. He then said that the Fed should start raising the effective Fed rate earlier than projected. The idea is that the […]
Scott Sumner made a very important point a while back (and repeatedly since) in a post wherein he makes a bunch of other (IMO) not very good points: Income and wealth inequality data: Nonsense on stilts His crucial (and I think true) point, in my words: you can’t think coherently about inequality — especially wealth inequality — if […]
Update appended below. —- After a two-and-a-half-month hiatus from regular blogging here—most of my few posts this summer related to my passion about animal rescue and animal welfare—I’m once again feeling like posting about politics, at least more regularly than I posted this summer. (And maybe soon I’ll once again feel like posting about legal […]
Dan here….The Largest climate march in history is happening today. Jan Galkowski responds to a Wall Street Journal editorial. He requested that comments be written at his website in order to consolidate questions and answers. by Jan Galkowski “It’ll be okay: Trust me”, redux Professor Steven Koonin offers up another dollop of vague, specious criticism of […]
August brings us the annual Irish immigration data, so it’s time to look at what has happened in their statistical reporting “year” that ended in April 2014. While better than last year, it’s still not pretty. According to the Central Statistics Office, net emigration continued in 2013-14, with net emigration of 21,400. a decline of […]