by New Deal democrat The economy in 2019: a look at the “big picture” Although I have a bunch of nerdy forecasting models, I view my primary mission as trying to explain what is going on in the economy for ordinary middle and working class American workers and consumers.I’ve been meaning to do a “30,000 […]
Is Stephen Moore a Gold Bug? A lot of the criticisms of putting the twin village idiots known as Herman Cain and Stephen Moore on the FED assert that they are gold bugs. Kate Riga watched CNN when Erin Burnett interviewed Stephen Moore on this allegation: Stephen Moore tries to flip-flop on the gold standard — but […]
Economics, the Realm of Money and the Significance of GDP Growth, with an Application to Child Labor What’s economics? There are two answers. One is it’s the sphere of human activity encompassing the production and distribution of goods and services, which has sometimes been referred to as provisioning. This is quite a lot but not […]
February JOLTS: a mirror of the poor jobs report The JOLTS report on labor is noteworthy and helpful because it breaks down the jobs market into a more granular look at hiring, firing, and voluntary quits. Its drawback is that the data only goes back less than 20 years, so from the point of view […]
Elizabeth Warren Wants to Collect More in Corporate Profits Taxes John Harwood reports: Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposes raising $1 trillion in government revenue from a new tax on profits of the largest corporations. The proposed surtax would prevent Amazon and other companies with profits exceeding $100 million from wiping out their tax liabilities altogether. […]
Real wages got gassed in March The consumer price index rose +0.4% in March, mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. That really shouldn’t have been a surprise, since almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did in March — up 9% for the month […]
Downturn in manufacturing new orders adds to evidence of slowdown I don’t normally pay much attention to the new factory orders report, because it is simply too noisy to be of much use. But as of February’s report, released Monday and showing a -0.1% decline in “core” new orders, there is enough to at least […]
In a low inflation world firms tend to raise prices once a year, typically in the first quarter of the calendar year or their fiscal year. Because of this very strong seasonal pattern, on a not seasonally adjusted around 50% of the annual increase in the core CPI — excluding food and energy — occurs […]
Does Cochrane Really Understand the Latest on Minimum Wages? John Cochrane thinks we liberals who think higher minimum wages can do some good by offsetting monopsony power fail to grasp labor economics. He is citing some work by Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jonathan Meer. Alas his blog post screwed up the link to this […]
France’s Fiscal Dilemma Solved I was struck by this morning’s headline in the New York Times: No doubt this was intended as irony, but that itself is ironic, since the “unrealistic” attitude it sums up is actually a good starting point for policy. France has one of the world’s better welfare states, and it should be preserved […]