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

Inflation Expectations in the USA

In case anyone is interested, I put together a lot of stuff I have been doing with inflation expectations into a soft of manuscript here (warning 19 poorly written pages) The conclusions Inflation expectations are not anchored. A simple regression model fits both the median Livingston Survey respondent’s expected CPI inflation and five year TIPS […]

Speaking of Jimmy Carter and Energy

Of course Carter’s approach to dealing with energy did not consist only with eliminating the insane regulation keeping US crude oil prices below world crude oil prices. Totally aside from (and opposite too) freeing the market, he also subsidized potential new sources of energy. As I recalled correctly, he focused particularly on “shale oil” and […]

Capital Liberalization and Inequality

by Joseph Joyce (is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College and the Faculty Director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs) Capital Liberalization and Inequality Inequality, which has drawn a great deal of comment and analysis following the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has sometimes been seen as […]

Private ownership of public infrastructure… A doom of inequality

It is happening as I feared. Hilary Russ writes… Private money, public projects: More U.S. states doing deals. The movement has started for private funds to own public infrastructure. This is the entrenchment of inequality, which will be very hard to reverse. So why do I fear private ownership of public infrastructure? From what I […]

Three Expensive Milliseconds

Paul Krugman references a paper by NYU Stern School of Business Associate Professor Thomas Philippon that “puts it at several hundred billion dollars per year.”   Three Expensive MillisecondsPaul KriugmanNew York Times Op-EdApril 13, 2014 (April 14th, 2014 Edition) …Mr. Philippon starts with the familiar observation that finance has grown much faster than the economy […]

ALEC: Destroying the American Economy, One State at a Time

The American Legislative Exchange Council — which authors ultra-conservative legislation and promulgates it to state legislatures nationwide — has a little index measure of states’ “competitiveness,” which supposedly results in greater prosperity for those states that rank highly. Does it? Let’s let the numbers speak for themselves: Source (PDF). Cross-posted at Asymptosis.