Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100 Years Old On the forthcoming March 24. This last of the Beat Poets, who founded and still owns both the City Lights bookstore and the associated City Lights press, which legally overcame an effort in 1956 to prevent him from publishing Allen Ginsberg’s poem, _Howl_, he is not only alive and […]
By Steve Roth (reposted from Evonomics) The Real Reason Stock Buybacks Are a Problem Buybacks are a massive tax dodge for shareholders Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer’s New York Times op-ed, “Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks,” has thrown internet gasoline on the buyback debate. The left is waving the flag, and the right is trying to tear it down. […]
Leading scenes from the February jobs report Let me catch up with some details from last Friday’s employment report. As a preliminary matter, the overwhelming take was that the poor +20,000 gain was “nothing to see here, just an outlier.” The problem with that take is that, for all of 2018, the average monthly gain […]
by New Deal democrat More evidence for a Q4 “Recession Watch” About a month ago, based on those Q4 2018 reports that had not been delayed by the government shutdown, plus workarounds for those that were missing, I went of “Recession Watch” for Q4 of this year. Now all of the missing pieces have been […]
Real wage growth continued to improve in February Now that we have February’s CPI (up +0.2%), let’s update nominal and real wage growth. First, here is a graph of nominal wage growth YoY vs. consumer inflation YoY since the beginning of this expansion almost 10 years ago: First of all, why do I bother […]
Is Russia Becoming A Neo-Socialist NEP Economy? Probbly not, but there has been some movement in that direction. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was the Socviet system in the 1920s after the WarCommunism period and before Stalin imposed command central planning as well ass full state ownership of the means of production, classsic socialism. The […]
Brad DeLong got a huge amount of attention by saying it was time for neoliberals such as Brad DeLong to pass the baton to those to their left. Alarmingly, he seems to have written this first on twitter. Zach Beuchamp rescued it from tawdry twitter to now very respectable blogosphere with an interview. One interesting […]
Negative Nov. and Dec. revisions overwhelm positive January retail sales The initial spin on this morning’s delayed retail sales report for January has been positive, with for example the Wall Street Journal calling it a “rebound” and “a sign of solid economic momentum in the first quarter. Ummmmm, No. Both nominally and in real terms, retails sales […]
Via Brad Delong comes two pedictions FROM 2008/09 from our current economist in the White House here. Larry Kudlow (December 7, 2007): Bush Boom Continues: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). Goldilocks is alive and well. […]
A modest proposal to use FICA-style tax withholding as a transition to “Medicare for All” Probably the foremost reform advanced by the Democratic Party at present is “Medicare for All.” Personally I don’t particularly care whether it is ultimately necessary to have single payer (like Canada) or universal coverage (like France or Germany) or a […]