Financial Times Has GDP outgrown its use? By David Pilling has an excellent beginners article on the make up and use of GDP that poses questions: Simon Kuznets, the Belarusian-American economist often credited with inventing GDP in the 1930s, had severe reservations about the concept right from the start. Coyle told me, “He did a […]
This is my FRED graph of the day post. Recently I was almost semi convinced by the Conservative argument that recent unusually rapid growth of employment fit what they said would happen if the extended unemployment insurance program ended. Then I glanced at the data on flows from unemployment to employment and noted that there […]
Here is a video from the IMF… At the 4 minute point, the representative talks about youth unemployment in Europe and recommends two things… training to appropriate skills which would make someone more valuable. bringing down costs of employment. Oh, how wonderful!… Make your skills more valuable only to meet wage suppression. They just do […]
ProGrowthLiberal in his comments on my last post and in his own post at EconoSpeak highlights the fact that drug-maker AbbVie already makes most of its profits outside the United States, about 87% in fact over 2011-2013 by his calculation. For PGL, then, AbbVie is not the best example of an inversion because the horse […]
My http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/07/anchored-perceived-inflation-or-how-fox-news-helped-obama.html has received more attention than I would have guessed. This should be a semi-serious post on the topic. The puzzling fact is the persistently too high forecasts of next years consumer price index inflation reported in the University of Michigan Thomson Reuters Survey of Consumer Sentiment. The median forecast has consistently been over […]
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism adds an additional look at the ‘inversion’ process and rationale: Kenneth Thomas has been on this beat at Angry Bear. Here’s a short overview of how inversion deals work earlier this week,,, ,,, David Cay Johnston emailed me that there were errors in Forbes contributor Tim Worstall’s recent criticisms of […]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The Economist online magazine has an article called, Jobs are not Enough, where they show a poor understanding of effective demand. “Economic growth over the business cycle is driven mostly by swings in demand, and in recent years demand has been held back: households have been repaying their debts; the government has restrained its […]
David Cay Johnston emailed me that there were errors in Forbes contributor Tim Worstall’s recent criticisms of the linked article. Indeed there are, but the biggest one (or at least the funniest one) isn’t the one Johnston pointed me to. Worstall writes that AbbVie’s pending inversion will not, by itself, reduce the taxes the company […]
John Bluedorn and Shengzu Wang wrote a post on the IMF blog called, Euro Area: An Unbalanced Rebalancing? They talk about the unbalanced Current Account trade balances within Europe where creditor nations continue with large surpluses, even though debtor nations are moving toward surpluses themselves. They give reasons of competitiveness, increased saving and low investment. […]
I read an article by Gavyn Davies, Another False Alarm on US Inflation?. He states that projections of rising inflation are not warranted due to lack of wage-growth pressures. I agree with him, but I want to go one step further and say that the uptick in inflation is understandable. I have written before about […]