Via Economist’s View is Mark Thoma’s new column in Financial Times Why is the Recovery so Agonizingly Slow? Why is the Recovery so Agonizingly Slow?, by Mark Thoma: Friday’semployment report underscored just how slow the recovery from the Great Recession has been. When the recession officially ended in June of 2009 the unemployment rate stood at […]
As the Euler equation begins its descent into history, where will we go from here? Well, we must understand the social psychology impacting consumption. It is not always true that higher interest rates leads to less consumption and more saving. Just look at the financial repression in China, where higher returns to savings increase consumption. […]
Noah Smith wrote a GREAT! post about how the data does not support the Euler equation. His post strikes at the heart of why economics and monetary policy is failing. Hopefully, we will see a revolution in thought about interest rates and monetary policy. The one sentence from his post that empowers the rebels is… […]
Labor’s share of national income sets a limit upon the utilization of labor and capital. That is the basic principle of effective demand. Domestic production periodically hits the effective demand limit. But are imports also constrained by the effective demand limit? Yes, they are, at least for the US. Let’s look at imports to exports. […]
House Speaker John Boehner told a closed meeting of his colleagues that a Republican pollster found that for the first time, most Americans blame President Barack Obama for the economic troubles, not George W. Bush. “Barack Obama came into office blaming George W. Bush for the state of the economy and the lack of job […]
Via an Economic Policy Newsflash (hat tip KH): On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 at 9:15 a.m. ET, Jason Furman (Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers), Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) will join EPI President Lawrence Mishel to discuss the economic case for raising the federal minimum wage and their […]
I don’t think there’s anything eye-popping or revolutionary this post, but it’s thinking that I’ve been finding useful. Long before Larry Summers bruited his recent ideas about secular stagnation and the need for bubbles, I came up against this great line from Nick Rowe (April 2011): The economy wants a Ponzi scheme. I’ve been pondering […]
I’m rather devastated to find (thanks to Tom Brown at Pragmatic Capitalism!) a discussion I missed at Winterspeak’s place from mid-December, with some of my favorite commenters going after the underconsumption argument that I’ve been going on about. It starts by citing Mark Sadowski’s comment from Interfluidity “clarifying the difference between wealth and income.” I […]
by Robert Waldmann Poverty and the Laboratories of Democracy Kevin Drum reports on the latest effort by a Republican to pretend he gives a damn about the poor. Marco Rubio proposes, among other things, the bold new idea of block grants. Drum condemns the proposal, but writes that there have been some advantages from Fedralism. […]
This wave occurred 3 days ago and is an analogy for investing when stock prices are high. One guy barely escaped. The other guy thought he could make it. But he may end up winning the biggest wave of the year, and receive a bunch of money. Life is funny that way.