I am marking my beliefs to market as Brad DeLong does from time to time. One of my old beliefs whose market quotation has declined is extreme skepticism about the effectivenss of US monetary policy at the zero lower bound. This skepticism was largely caused by what I perceived to be the weak effects of […]
Via Southern Education Foundation: Students are eligible for free meals if they live in households with no more than 135 percent of the poverty level, and they qualify for reduced-price meals if household income is no more than 185 percent of the poverty level. In 2013, the federal poverty threshold was $23,550 for a family […]
No, it’s not a sports score. It’s the number of $100 million incentive packages offered in each place beginning in 2010. This is based on my first paper to use the February 2015 update of Good Jobs First’s Megadeals database (you can download the entire update in spreadsheet form). I’ve said before that U.S. investment […]
by Joseph Joyce To fix or not to fix: Jeffry Frieden’s “Currency Politics” The decision by the Swiss National Bank to abandon its peg to the euro serves as an example of the relatively limited life spans of fixed exchange rate regimes. While the fragility of exchange rate commitments has been known since the publication […]
Update 1 pulled up here (Dean Baker says current dividends plus share buybacks are unsustainable) Update 2 Nick Bunker considers the dramatic example of Apple and the issue of unsustainable payouts to shareholders. The point of this post is to try to estimate the sustainable long run expected real return on US common stock. Historically, […]
These are the usual confused thoughts mostly stimulated by this excellent post by Simon Wren-Lewis You really should click the link and read that post. I will try to summarise it. First professor Wren-Lewis argues that monetary policy would not have offset less contractionary fiscal policy in the past 6 years, because short term safe […]
Basic income in a Dauphin Manitoba. Less boring headline ? Social Welfare Programs and the Culture of Dependency III. Click the link. Note that just giving poor people money causes increased high school enrollment.
Disappointingly, the BEA flash estimate is that US GDP grew at an annualized rate of only 2.6% from the third to the fourth quarter of 2014 after having grown at a 5 % annualized rate from the second to the third. This is well within the ordinary range of changes of growth rates without a […]
This article via Yahoo news caught my attention: Five years into recovery, Dow Companies squeeze workers as investors thrive I think this picture spells it out rather well. “As the chart shows, the 30 huge companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average have barely nudged their employee ranks higher…” But this is even […]