With the earlier discussion of investments I thought a chart would be of interest. As you can see, investments grew until the Republicans started cutting taxes, supposedly to increase investments. (Cutting taxes to grow investments)
Way to rally the base Turtle Neck! NY Times: No Social Security Raises Even if Medicare Soars WASHINGTON — The 60 million people on Social Security will not receive any cost-of-living increase in their benefits in 2016, the government said Thursday, but because of a quirk in federal law, nearly one-third of Medicare beneficiaries could […]
Adair Turner was interviewed by INET about his new book which I have to buy and read. The book came out this week. It is called, Between Debt and the Devil. Here is the interview. (link) He lays out an exquisite analysis of economics on many layers. How the crisis was not expected due to […]
This has produced another edition of “Simple Answers to Simple Questions.” Just to expand this a bit, and to deal with the 1987 absurdity, the proximate cause of the 1989 adjustment—an adjustment of less than 10% in the Dow that only took two full calendar months to return to its level at close on 12 […]
by Joseph Joyce The External Debt of the Emerging Market Economies The outflow of money from emerging markets this year will most likely surpass inflows for the first time since 2008, and net capital outflows may total $541 billion according to the Institute of International Finance. The flows have been accompanied by currency depreciations, stock […]
When one hears talk about the Wicksellian natural rate of interest, one hears that a real rate below the natural rate will cause inflation and economic heating. Then a a real rate above the natural rate will lead to disinflation and economic cooling. “Wicksellian analysis is an older tradition; it argues that there is at […]
My previous post talked about how profits peaked 12 months ago coinciding with the economy hitting the effective demand limit. The idea is that profit margins will peak at the effective demand limit. Keynes stated this… “Thus the volume of employment is given by the point of intersection between the aggregate demand function and the […]
By way of a video from Boom Bust (the best show for economics news), Barclays says that the 60 basis point drop in corporate profit margins in the S&P500 over the last 12 months is a sign that we are heading toward a recession. (see 22:30 minute point of video.) The Barclays’ message coincides exactly […]
One hears that the Federal Reserve would like to normalize the Fed rate. What does that mean? How can we conceptualize that? Well, there are many ways to conceptualize it, but here is a simple way using measures of the growth of nominal GDP (NGDP). In normalization, the Fed rate will rise to the growth […]
I think it is best to just click and read this. In a study published this year in Nature Neuroscience, several co-authors and I found that family income is significantly correlated with children’s brain size — specifically, the surface area of the cerebral cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain that does most […]