In a post by Shobhana Chandra and Jeanna Smialek at Bloomberg called Yellen Spending Mix lacks Ingredient of Higher Pay, there is a quote… “It doesn’t “add up,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research in New York. “Consumer confidence is at a cycle high, and consumption is declining. You also […]

  This video of a speech by Ben Bernanke in 2003, is quite interesting. In the speech he laid the groundwork for what would eventually be his policy to combat the Great Recession. He talked about inflation, slack in the economy, price stability and even the possibility of taking the Fed funds rate to the […]

Yves at Naked Capitalism writes “NY Fed’s Bogus Estimate of Return on College and the Neglect of the Intellectual Commons” Yesterday, the New York Fed released a new report by Jaison R. Abel and Richard Dietz, Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs? which is getting good coverage in the mainstream media. Its […]

by Sandwichman at Econospeak Supply Creates Its Own Demon: Marc Andreessen and “Textbook Luddism” Marc Andreessen has a column in the Financial Times with the headline, “Robots will not eat the jobs but will unleash our creativity.” Here are the first two paragraphs: A growing number of people seem to fear that robots will eat […]

With the model presented in the previous post, Attractor States in the Business cycle, we could conceivably project the path of the next business cycle. How could we do this? The model shows that productive capacity regularly rose by 18%. The last rise was 17%. So I will assume a 17% rise in attractor productive […]

This post has been updated! I just posted about the Silly Confusion over Potential GDP. The main idea of the post is that real GDP made a transition to a new normal level after the crisis. And patterns from past business cycles show that real GDP stays close to this new level. But then two […]

by New Deal democrat at Bonddad blog   Re-posted with author’s permission. Greg Mankiw: as duteous to the vices of plutocracy as badness would require There is a drastic moral difference between those who write garbage analysis because they are mistaken, and those who write garbage analysis that is loathesome.  Greg Mankiw embarrasses Harvard with an […]

As a small economist, my views are not seriously taken seriously. But still, if I turn out to be right, I will have bragging rights. So Paul Krugman wrote today about how the IMF way over-estimated the potential growth path of GDP. His post is titled, The Damage Done… “That’s a huge shortfall.  Yet the […]

I learned a fact from Chris Dillow who went on to conjecture that “consumers -in aggregage – have genuine foresight” I agree that “confidence” is a non-explanation for fluctuations in consumer spending. Such fluctuations can, for the most part, be explained by observable economic variables such as incomes, unemployment and credit availability, as John Muellbauer, […]

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pacts, the increased desire to ‘invert’ ownership and headquarters by ‘American’ companies, TISA (published only by Wikileaks?), points us to a world managed by what organizations? Via Alternet comes a note in TISA, a trade agreement that tries to frame itself in the private/government rhetoric, but we need to […]