‘Food desert’ is not a common idea on people’s minds, but we also tend to say “Let them eat cake” when it comes to obesity. Michael Pollan suggests: Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. “Always […]
No sooner do I comment on the difference between tax planning and tax avoidance than Richard Murphy points out that several multinational corporations are having their tax deals looked at for potential violations of the European Union’s state aid rules. As The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal report, there are three cases currently under […]
Tyler Cowen has a post at the New York Times about how war can rejuvenate the economy in various ways. We need to be very careful not to jump on him and accuse him of being a war-monger. I remember when many people jumped on me for recommending a recession based on Christina Romer’s speech. […]
by David Zetland (re posted from Aguanomics) Who has the right to leaked water? SM sent this question a few months ago: My thesis is about conjunctive water use and the hydrologic externalities that arise from a change in water use (e.g., increased irrigation efficiency or canal lining). I am focusing in the canal seepage/lining […]
(Dan here) Ceres has published a recent report on growing corn for ethanol costs-relating to water use, where corn is grown, and why. The report includes the impact on global food prices. David Zetland at Aguanomics points us to a growing concern about the increasing use of natural gas (and fracking). Is natural gas the next […]
by Joseph Joyce The ECB’s Daunting Task Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, and the members of the ECB’s Governing Council are receiving praise for the initiatives they announced last week to avoid deflation (see here and here). The immediate impact of the announcement was a rise in European stock prices. But the […]
A commenter on our Angry Bear blog, Axt113, asked questions to understand what effective demand is. He/she like many think that effective demand is simply aggregate demand. But that is not true. They are different concepts. It is very important in the current economic sickness to understand the role of effective demand. So I will […]
Mark Thoma at MoneyWatch points to : Why income redistribution doesn’t hurt growth, by Mark Thoma: Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” documents the increase in inequality in recent decades, and it has rekindled an old debate about the effects of income redistribution on economic growth. Until recently, most economists believed there’s a trade-off between […]
As the ECB (European Central Bank) loosens monetary policy even more in the face of falling inflation, we will see a test of the Fisher Effect. The idea is that inflation is low because nominal rates have been low and projected to stay low for a considerable length of time. The actions of the ECB […]
Barry Ritholtz has a post showing that rates are very low in many countries. He isn’t quite sure what is going on with such low yields on 10-year bonds, so he asks… “What is up with Yields?” Maybe we could say that there is lots of liquidity out there. Maybe we could say that there […]