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 […]
Janet Yellen gave a speach which has received a lot of attention and not just because she is one of the most powerful people in the world. I agree with Lorcan Roche Kelly that the best parts are footnotes 28 and 26. I got into a twitter debate with Andy Harless who was unconvinced by […]
Modern Monetary Theory has been revolutionary in economics, and its influence is — beneficially — ever-more pervasive. It has opened the eyes of a generation to a clear-eyed, accounting-based methodology that trumps dimensionless theory, and has brought a deep, nuts-and-bolts understanding of money, debt, and financial institutions to a discipline where that understanding has been inexcusably […]
There is a post by Dietz Vollrath, Labor’s Share, Profits, and the Productivity Slowdown. D. Vollrath has some math there for how a decline in labor share along with a rise in aggregate mark-ups can show that productivity growth is slowing. Mark-ups are the price over marginal cost. Normally in perfect competition, price is equal to […]
A new paper came out this month from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System talking about how Potential Output is lowered after recessions. (link) They make a case that potential output is lower than people think and that the economy adjusts too slowly to that reality. At the end of the paper, […]
Stocks continue downward.. China is struggling… Commodity exporting countries are in trouble… industrial production is projected to be weak in September as it was in August… Could the US economy be forming a recession? First, I have had the opinion that there are hidden weaknesses in the economy partly due to the strange monetary policy […]
Or that is what is being thought by the Social Security Administration as we round out 2015 and head into 2016. And the culprit? “Persistently Low Inflation.” How could that be, didn’t the Fed just meet and there were concerns of looming inflation? Apparently not enough inflation to rock the CPI-W. The SS COLAs are […]