Based on this report from the Economic Policy Institute Federal minimum wage increase comes this EPI info graphic pointing to some useful comparisons for general readers: The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage is lower today than it was in 1968. If the value of the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages since […]
Stormy wrote in 2008 a narrative for the last few decades on trade…still relevent: Trade means jobs; trade brings money into plants; trade surpluses ripple through the economy, providing not only wealth to employers and employees alike but also moneys into public coffers. Consider it “outside money” flowing into a town, county, state, or country. […]
A few is more than two but not a lot. As noted below, I don’t have the gift which it takes to be simple. I really can’t manage 2 period models which illustrate my confused thoughts. My last post (which was messy especially the math in plain ascii and spelling) noted that the government spending […]
Yves Smith and Dean Baker on Secrets in Trade
First “two Keynesian” is a phrase which only I use. It means a new Keynesian model with two periods the present and next period and forever after when the economy is in steady state. I recently noticed that Krugman’s models, which are much simpler than models I can think up and which have clarified my […]
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published a letter titled, Consumer Inflation Views in Three Countries, written by Bharat Trehan and Maura Lynch. The letter explores inflation expectations among consumers in the UK, US and Japan. Basically the story is that inflation expectations by consumers are tied to the level of oil prices and […]
Mike Sankowski has been banging his spoon on the high chair about this forever. And rightly so. Repeat after Mike. And keep repeating it to anyone who will listen. The “higher-corporate-profits = jobs” meme is perhaps the most pernicious falsehood in political economics. How Business Owners Think For almost ten years I was co-founder and […]
HENRY GIROUX: Oh, I mean, I think that’s the biggest lie of all actually. The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values. I learned about two maps […]
What if an economist expects the natural level of real output to be higher? How would the natural rate of interest change by expecting a lower natural rate of output? First, I personally expect a lower natural limit upon real GDP. I see that real GDP is trending on a new normal level below the […]
Economists are thinking that the natural real interest rate might be negative… one factor that would lead them to think that way is that the economy is growing so slow. The principle behind that is this… if the real Fed rate is above the natural rate, the effect is contractionary upon real GDP. So if […]