Lifted from comments from Edward Lambert’s International flows Part 4 comes a reminder from Angry Bear Steve Roth: This is all part of the universal “saving/saving” confusion.  See Nick’s post “Why ‘Saving’ Should be Abolished” http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2012/01/why-saving-should-be-banned.html Key point, I think, been meaning to write a (another) post on this: “The economy” cannot “save” money. For […]

Dean Baker was polite in responding to another story from the Washington Post in the campaign to discredit the program: That’s what the headline of the front page Washington Post story might have read if the purpose was to inform readers. Instead the lengthy piece (which covers the whole back page) told readers that Social […]

I posted in the morning a graph of unit labor costs compared to inflation and labor share (% change over year). There was a key insight. If someone was to stop and think, the insight is actually important. Sometimes important ideas get lost in a post. So this post is to make sure it is […]

Inflation is low and has been declining for years. I want to present a model to explain a dynamic between inflation and unit labor costs. First let’s look at a chart of the two of them over the years. (semi-annual data, % change from year ago) They move together with more noise in the unit […]

Previously, I had written on Fair Market Value and its use by the CBO’s Douglas Elmendorf to rate the risk of Student Loans as advocated by both The New America Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. A rebuttal answer to a partisan CBO, the right-leaning New America Foundation, and the conservative Heritage Foundation on the usage […]

So the question has arisen as to whether the yield curve in Japan has inverted before its most recent recessions. And the answer is no… Credit seeking alpha for this chart and Alan Thomson at Terra Firma Financial for digging it out. (JGB is Japanese government bonds.) Before the last 3 recessions in Japan the […]

by Dale Coberly How to Sound Insane by Talking Like a Bi Partisan Expert on Social Security I apologize for the next couple of paragraphs because they sound overworked and insane,  but that’s what happens when you try to illustrate the way Washington talks about Social Security. Try to imagine you have to buy a medicine […]

Via Economist’s view: Mark Thoma writes:  This is a research summary from the NBER Digest. It discusses work from Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Song that finds “Workers bear substantial costs as a result of the ‘shock’ of rising import competition”: Employment Effects of International Trade, by Claire Brunel, NBER Digest: In the past two decades, […]

Many people look for an inverted yield curve to signal a recession. The track record is good. The yields on longer term maturities decline in relation to shorter term yields. Let me show a version of the inverted yield chart that I haven’t seen anyone do yet. I take the 3-year Treasury constant maturity rate […]

Here is a chart comparing the savings rates of the US and China… Thanks to a friend in Chile who sent me this chart from Fidelity International. On the x-axis is GDP per capita. So the more economically advanced countries are to the right. The chart on the left shows that China has low household […]