James Hamilton at econbrowser has a fascinating post titled, “Why isn’t inflation lower?” He presents a paper titled, Is The Phillips Curve Alive and Well After All? Inflation Expectations and the Missing Disinflation, written by Olivier Coibion at UT Austin and NBER and Yuriy Gorodnichenko at UC Berkeley and NBER. It would not be easy […]

Via the Washington Post: Here’s David Cay Johnston, interviewed by Joshua Holland (link from Joseph Delaney), in response to a question about “why we have a very low tax burden overall, relative to other wealthy countries, but a lot of Americans feel that they’re being taxed to death?”: Well, one of the reasons some Americans […]

Here is a video of an interview done by International Business Times UK. The video addresses the issue of “Mis-selling of derivatives” before the crisis. The banks are stalling on judgements so that the time limit passes and people cannot bring claims against them. They are also doing some other unethical things. Yet, the government […]

But weak job growth in the face of big corporate profits. As I explained in the video of a previous post, the supply of money to capital income has increased, and they are enjoying the cost savings from low interest rates. They give many thanks to the Fed’s monetary policy. Meanwhile, lower interest rates are […]

This little video puts into 1 minute and 43 seconds, the simple challenges to Abenomics in Japan. Getting money from the corporations into the pockets of the people, namely labor, namely the consumers. Aging population on fixed income. They like deflation. Small percentage of children in population. Children are actually outnumbered by pets.  

Brad DeLong reviews Alan Greenspan’s new book: Alan Greenspan: The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting: The true size of the American subprime problem was hidden for years by the defective bookkeeping of the GSEs…. Not until the summer of 2007 did the full magnitude of the subprime problem […]

Is there a case for raising interest rates by the Fed? Even a weird one? In the previous post, I explained the reasoning behind the current lower level of real GDP. The explanation is that real GDP declines to an equilibrium with the low interest rate in the money market for labor income. So if […]

by Mike Kimel The Efficient Racing Hypothesis Professor Sporkweather Mo of Fridgewater University has famously postulated that a driver cannot consistently achieve better than average finishes on a recklessness-adjusted basis, provided that all drivers have the same information on track and weather conditions at the start of a race. Using decades of data on drivers […]

Via the Real News is Bill Black on the JP Morgan setttlement: DESVARIEUX: Okay. And because of these massive losses, now JPMorgan has to pay this $13 billion settlement. But it’s really being reported as this big step toward bringing the banks to justice for their role in the financial crisis. Do you actually agree […]

I wrote in February of 2012 about welfare: Welfare, I’m not hurting from it and neither are you. I noted the following: but it looks to me like what we spend on welfare is not much more than what the government is spending on just doing the government thingy, unless of course people can’t get […]