Ireland remains, in some circles, a poster child for austerity’s success: It paid off its bailout loan early! It regained its 2007 Gross Nation Income per capita in 2014! Unemployment is only 8.9%! Don’t believe the hype. Paul Krugman recently pointed out that Ireland’s employment performance continues to be dismal, especially in comparison with currency-devaluing, […]

Been taking some time to recoup from back surgery (8 inch gash Lumbar area), catch my breath, and find some more interesting topics on which to write. There are some awesome reads out there if you just take some time to search for them. – Another Christmas gift from Dean Baker; The Effort to Divert […]

This is the third of a series of posts on the non accelerating wage inflation rate of unemployment (NAWRU) estimated by the European Commission. In the first, I argue that this estimate is very important because it is used to implement the Stability and Growth Pact. In the second, I argue that the NAWRU is […]

By way of JimH in the comments section, the ratio of inventories to sales has been rising through 2015. (link to graph) Through the 1990’s and into the 2000’s, inventories were dropping with such things as advances in supply chain management and point of sale inventory control. However since the crisis, that trend is reversing. […]

Periodically I present updated information about consumption from capital and labor income. Using the NIPA accounts and labor share, I can separate consumption by capital and labor. Total consumption is trending steadily upward. Even with consumption trending steadily, in 2013 consumption by capital income began to move sideways, while consumption by labor income began to […]

This is the first of five posts I promised to write in this post. NAWRU stands for the Non Accelerating Wage inflation Rate of unemployment. It is a concept used by the European Commission when deciding how much to allow Treasuries adhering to the Stability and Growth Pact to spend. The commission considers cyclical adjustments […]

European Commission fiscal dictates are based on outdated economic theory, strange econometrics and arbitrary ad hoc restrictions on parameter estimates. It is not easy to discuss the technique behind that which presents itself as technocracy with a straight face. The ‘cracy part is genuinely powerful, so this matters. This will be the first of a […]

CBO’s 2015 Long-Term Projections for Social Security: Additional Information The Social Security Policy Options, 2015 was not the only report released by CBO yesterday. You have this one filling out the details in the Long-Term Budget Outlook Haven’t read this one either. So you all get first shot at framing the debate! Go get ’em […]

by Joseph Joyce The Enduring Relevance of “Manias, Panics, and Crashes” The seventh edition of Manias, Panics, and Crashes has recently been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Charles Kindleberger of MIT wrote the first edition, which appeared in 1978, and followed it with three more editions. Robert Aliber of the Booth School of Business at the […]

Capacity utilization dropped in November. The drop makes me reflect upon when I first began formulating the equations for effective demand in 2012-13. I made predictions to test the equations. Each prediction guided me to understand effective demand. One early prediction was that the natural rate of unemployment was around 7%. This graph comes from […]