Real GDP came out today. The number was $15,790 billion for the 3rd quarter 2013. Back in July, I posted an article that Real GDP had an appointment to keep with Effective Demand. I showed a series of graphs from the past of how real GDP grows up to the effective demand limit before a […]

Lets play a game. The ultimate point of the game is to understand certain aspects of Social Security but to keep complications from creeping in too early (wait for later parts) we are going to start with simple game play on a board far, far away. In fact on distant yet oddly Earth-like Planet Elsinore. […]

Lifted from comments from Edward Lambert’s International flows Part 4 comes a reminder from Angry Bear Steve Roth: This is all part of the universal “saving/saving” confusion.  See Nick’s post “Why ‘Saving’ Should be Abolished” http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2012/01/why-saving-should-be-banned.html Key point, I think, been meaning to write a (another) post on this: “The economy” cannot “save” money. For […]

Dean Baker was polite in responding to another story from the Washington Post in the campaign to discredit the program: That’s what the headline of the front page Washington Post story might have read if the purpose was to inform readers. Instead the lengthy piece (which covers the whole back page) told readers that Social […]

I posted in the morning a graph of unit labor costs compared to inflation and labor share (% change over year). There was a key insight. If someone was to stop and think, the insight is actually important. Sometimes important ideas get lost in a post. So this post is to make sure it is […]

Inflation is low and has been declining for years. I want to present a model to explain a dynamic between inflation and unit labor costs. First let’s look at a chart of the two of them over the years. (semi-annual data, % change from year ago) They move together with more noise in the unit […]

Previously, I had written on Fair Market Value and its use by the CBO’s Douglas Elmendorf to rate the risk of Student Loans as advocated by both The New America Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. A rebuttal answer to a partisan CBO, the right-leaning New America Foundation, and the conservative Heritage Foundation on the usage […]

So the question has arisen as to whether the yield curve in Japan has inverted before its most recent recessions. And the answer is no… Credit seeking alpha for this chart and Alan Thomson at Terra Firma Financial for digging it out. (JGB is Japanese government bonds.) Before the last 3 recessions in Japan the […]

by Dale Coberly How to Sound Insane by Talking Like a Bi Partisan Expert on Social Security I apologize for the next couple of paragraphs because they sound overworked and insane,  but that’s what happens when you try to illustrate the way Washington talks about Social Security. Try to imagine you have to buy a medicine […]

Via Economist’s view: Mark Thoma writes:  This is a research summary from the NBER Digest. It discusses work from Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Song that finds “Workers bear substantial costs as a result of the ‘shock’ of rising import competition”: Employment Effects of International Trade, by Claire Brunel, NBER Digest: In the past two decades, […]