This is likely to be a hot issue tomorrow. Today, Italy’s highest court of appeals is hearing Berlusconi’s appeal of his conviction for tax evasion and embezzling from his firm. As I wait for their decision, I write about the issue in general. Things are very different here East of the Channel. There is a […]

by Linda Beale Inequality: Obama’s Speech, Detroit’s Bankruptcy, Taxes Was Obama’s speech on inequality really what Michael Lind claims in “The Day the Right Lost the Economic Argument” Salon.com (July 25, 2013)? The right, both here and internationally, has been pushing for austerity for most while those at the top reap unparalleled rewards from upward-moving […]

To find out if productivity is really demand constrained, let’s look to see what happens when productivity is up against the effective demand limit. We will find that productivity stops and sits for a number of years. First we get the data and build the model. The data will come from this graph at FRED. […]

by Rebecca Wilder The trend in US corporate profits is what you think it is In my research for an article about the cross section of national income, I ran across this piece in Forbes by Tim Worstall. In this article, he uses proprietary Bloomberg and WSJ data for 2012 corporate offshore cash holdings to assess […]

I was watching a video from the World Economic Forum 2013  in Davos, Switzerland. The video is a panel discussion on the subject, “No growth, easy money, the new normal”. The World Economic Forum 2013 took place in January 2013. It is basically a discussion of monetary policy in dealing with the crisis. In the […]

I see this logical error so constantly, almost every day, that I feel the need to reiterate. Personal saving, virtuous and useful as it is for individuals, does not increase investment. This is what I call the “lump of money” fallacy (a.k.a. the loanable funds model). Ask yourself: If you transfer $10K from your bank […]

Lifted from comments: Run 75411 reacts to Daniel Alpert at Economonitor. : It appears much of the job growth has been in low wage opportunity which forces people to do with less and detracts from demand led economic growth. The economic bump in taking a lower wage paying job is just not that great; average Unemployment […]

A few people have asked me to provide a quick introduction to Edward Lambert’s recent work on Effective Demand, which work I’ve mentioned a few times. That’s ironic, because I made those mentions  in hopes that more-accomplished others would do the same for me. That help hasn’t been forthcoming, because quite a bit of work […]

Here is a 12 minute video on youtube of an interview from Davos, Switzerland, with Robert Shiller from Yale University. He says in the video that taxes should be raised on the rich if inequality gets worse. He seems content with the current level of inequality. He says that economics is not an exact science. […]

by Linda Beale Offshoring profits with captive reinsurance One of the ways that corporations manage to cut their federal income tax bills way, way below the statutory rate is by setting up reinsurance affiliates offshore.  While some of these reinsurance affiliates may actually function as full-service reinsurance companies to many different customers, those truly taking […]