The Two Percent Solution: Warren and the Stochastic Jubilee Wait long enough, and great ideas come back around, although not necessarily wearing the same garb. Elizabeth Warren has just come out for a 2% wealth tax (above $50 million).* But this is simply an annualized version of my lump sum stochastic jubilee. What’s the advantage of redistributing the […]
by Joseph Joyce Global Firms, National Policies Studies of international transactions often assume that national economies function as separate “islands” or “planets.” Each has its own markets and currency, and international trade and finance occurs when the residents of one economy exchange goods and services or financial assets with those of another. The balance of […]
Two economic notes on the shutdown The government shutdown is the economic equivalent of sustaining -800,000, or -0.5%, layoffs. The last time we saw that was in the Panic of 2008. So needless to say, it is very surprising that last week saw fewer official layoffs than at any time since November 1969. On a […]
The Nobel Economists Petitiion on Carbon Tax And Dividend Plan As many now know, a large group of prominent economists, led by a large group of Nobel Prize winners, has published a petition in the Wall Street Journal. This petition declares the idea of putting a tax on carbon and then returning the receipts from […]
Weirdly Non-Monotonic Yield Curves This is a situation that may be on the verge of disappearing and more or less normalizing, but over the last couple of months US bond markets have exhibited a weird phenomenon of non-monotonicity. It has been even weirder than what we saw during the period of negative nominal interest rates, […]
(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Rare Yglesias Google Fail (Most boring title after “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” but I couldn’t resist) Web savvy ultra wonk Matthew Yglesias wrote “There’s no polling on specific brackets or exactly who counts as rich that I can find,” Matty just google [income to be rich poll]. Jeez. Americans have varying ideas of how much […]
Industrial production: strong finish to 2018 Industrial production for December was reported this morning at +0.3%, slightly better than estimates. But what was really surprising is how strong the manufacturing component was, up over 1%: With this reading, YoY industrial production for manufacturing improved to +3.4%, and overall production came in just below 4%: This […]
Whatever Happened To Iran? Who? What? Where? Long a headliner in the news, Iran has disappeared from the headlines, and even the inside pages. It has largely disappeared from the news, after being the big headline for a long time. This is probably good for Iran, despite its many problems. I have made a big […]
by New Deal democrat Why I’m expecting a 2nd half rebound in housing In all of the storm und drang about yield curve inversions in the bond market, one important and overlooked consequence is how it is likely to help the very important housing sector. This post is up at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over […]
Notes on the government shutdown I have a post on the housing market pending at Seeking Alpha. If and when it goes up there, I will link to it here. In the meantime, here are a few important notes on the shutdown. I can’t find the quote now, but about a week ago it was […]