How people use economic terms mainly as a political stance comes in all levels of expertise and income levels. And how to combine advocacy and justice, whether from the Koch brothers or Walmart and McDonald’s workers, is often blurred and has only soft edges based on personal context and daily exposure to whatever one thinks […]
In China, imports have fallen quite a bit recently. The drop in imports was not just in commodities like copper and iron ore, but in non-commodities too. The implication is that their domestic demand is weak. From a WSJ article, Economists React: China’s Sluggish Imports Raise Concerns. I focus on the comment by one economist […]
Via newsletter from rjs: We’ll include Bill McBride’s graph from his coverage of this report below because it best shows how our trade deficit suddenly spiked over the past 5 months after 2 years of gradual improvement…reading from the top $0 line down, the black graph line tracks our deficit in petroleum trade only in […]
Also via the New York Times comes an article on NSA versus the internet giants like Google. I haven’t a clue (other than skepticism and ‘how does that work?’) as to what it actually means. Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest […]
Via Big Picture, Barry Ritholz points us to discussion on the role of ‘war’ in our economy: Preface: Many Americans – including influential economists and talking heads – still wrongly assume that war is good for the economy. For example, extremely influential economists like Paul Krugman and Martin Feldsteinpromote the myth that war is good […]
Even the big mutual fund giants won’t guarantee the principle in money market funds (the dollar threshold). Now here is an interesting notion for people to think on for a policy occurring in EU policy debates. What would this mean? From the New York Times: First there was ZIRP. Now get ready for NIRP. The first […]
It is common to see economists saying that once wages start to rise, inflation will rise too. Yet, I have been writing that inflation may not rise if wages rise. The reason is that capital income is consuming in historically tremendous amounts. And a rise in wages could mean a decline in profits, which would […]
No sooner had I finished my mini-series on evaluating proposed location subsidies then @varnergreg sends me this story about a new copper tubing manufacturing facility opening in one of the nation’s poorest counties, Wilcox County, Alabama. This is clearly the sort of place where I think we should consider using investment incentives, but the sheer […]
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism showed concern over my last post on rising labor share… “In reality, it’s even worse than that. I hate criticizing writers whose work I generally like, but as a contrast to this talk, I suggest you look at a new post by Ed Lambert at Angry Bear. In it, a […]
Steve Randy Waldman has utterly pre-empted the need for this post, cut to the core of the thing, in the opening line of his latest (collect the whole series!): When economics tried to put itself on a scientific basis by recasting utility in strictly ordinal terms, it threatened to perfect itself to uselessness. But I’ll try […]