Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions. Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on […]
JOLTS report confirms November payrolls strength I’m changing my presentation of JOLTS data somewhat compared with the last year or two. At this point I’ve pretty much beaten the dead horses of (1) “job openings” are soft and unreliable data, and should be ignored in contrast with the hard “hires” series; and (2) the overall […]
Negative Interest Rates and a Term Structure Puzzle James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending […]
Does the United States Have A “Poland Problem”? It certainly looks like it. Again, for anybody not having seen one of these, a “Poland problem” involves an apparent disconnect between economics and politics, nations with reasonably well performing economies where the populace becomes unhappy and supports opposition, especially “populist” nationalist authoritarian candidates, with 2015 victory […]
By Steve Roth (re posted) Why Economists Don’t Know How to Think about Wealth (or Profits) Until 2006, they quite literally weren’t playing with a full (accounting) deck. Most still aren’t In the next evolution of economics taking shape around us and among us, perhaps no school has been so transformational over recent decades as a loose, worldwide […]
A US economic Boom in 2018? For the last several years, I have tried to identify several graphs that most bear watching over the ensuing 12 months. This year, in addition to watching bond yields like everybody else, the data that most bears watching, it seems to me, can be summed up in the question: […]
How Trump Killed The Anti-Government Protests In Iran By very strongly and publicly supporting them and dragging the matter to the UN Security Council Of course, his supporters have been praising his “strong action” in comparison with Obama’s quiet approach to the 2009 demonstrations, meant to reduce accusations of the demonstraters being US pawns. Those […]
by Steven Roth “In the Beginning…Was the Unit of Account” – Twelve Myths About Money November 19th, 2017 Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with […]
Devin Smioth at New Economic Perspective points us to ‘where does the money go?”: After President Trump signed the GOP tax plan into law, some of the bill’s corporate beneficiaries have offered workers minor bonuses. But NEP’s Bill Black says they’re keeping most of the money for themselves — and starting a new global race […]
December jobs report: late cycle mediocre growth reasserts itself HEADLINES: +143,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate rose +0.1% from 8.0% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: rose +43,000 from […]