Drastically Changing the Rules On Infrastructure Spending Most observers have figured out that the Trump infrastructure spending plan seems to be weirdly lopsided in an unrealistic way, with $200 billion in federal spending somehow supposed to inspire a total of $1.5 trillion in spending by state and local sources along with private ones. What has […]
Bitcoin prices are an attractive topic for people who study behavioral finance. Behavioral means anything but rational expectations, Nash equilibrium and the Efficient Market Hypothesis. It is easy to argue that the fundamental value of Bitcoin is zero — it doesn’t yield income and there is no limit on the supply of cryptocurrency, because new […]
Interest rates: no shift in the economic weather yet I wanted to make two comments about what has been happening recently with interest rates, a short term look and a long term look. Today let’s discuss the short term. Since September, long term Treasury interest rates have risen from roughly 2.1% to 2.8%. The two […]
Why Tax Cuts for Rich Dude Will Lead to Little Stimulus Over at Brad DeLong’s blog jonny bakho adds an interesting comment: How much stimulus did the GWBush tax cuts provide? They came during a recession followed by “jobless recovery” made somewhat better by the housing bubble, then burst big time in 2008. How different would the […]
By Steve Roth (reposted from Evonomics) Consumption tax may not make sense You often hear calls out there — mostly from Right economists but also from some on the Left — for a consumption tax in the U.S. As presented, it’s a super-simple idea: tally your income, subtract your saving, and what’s left is your consumption. […]
Fraying at the edges? *relative* underemployment increases This is a post I’ve been meaning to put up all week (after all, this week was going to be very slow on data and news, right?). As the expansion gets more and more mature, the *relative* performance of certain measures of improvement become more interesting. One of […]
The first premise of Adam Smith’s famous metaphor about an “invisible hand” leading individuals to promote the public interest, although they intend only private gain, was that there is only so much work to go ’round. That is, Smith assumed there was a certain quantity of work to be done — a “lump of labor.” […]
(Dan here…Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Drum goes easy on Goldberg It is progress that hack conservatives are bothsidesing now. Jonah Goldberg correctly notes that the problem isn’t just Trump but also broader extreme partizanship. He asserts that both parties are to blame. He seems to know he can’t defend this assertion and declines to […]
With the market falling like it did over the past week it may prove valuable to look at the PE and some other economic reports. In my PE model the market became overvalued in December and January. The last observation is at the market close on Thursday, 8 February 2018. the previous two observation are […]
Jobless claims make another record low One reason not to get excited about the last week’s stock market swoon is that it isn’t being confirmed by any other short term leading indicators. Most significantly, jobless claims. The 4 week moving average of new jobless claims has fallen below 225,000. This is yet another 40 year […]