It is time to get serious. There are widespread claims that firms are cutting hours worked and converting full time jobs into part time jobs because of Obama-care. So what does the data say. Below is a table of unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of part time employment by private and […]
It can be tough to articulate a cogent argument against high-frequency trading in the context of highly liquid, efficiently functioning securities markets, but I think Rajiv Sethi has done so (riffing off Michael Lewis’s typically scathing and revealing article on Goldman’s recent bad behavior). In brief, in my words: 1. Value investors are trying to buy shares in […]
Thoma Bait I might as well be honest. I am posting this here rather than at rjwaldmann.blogspot.com , because I think it is the sort of thing to which Mark Thoma links and my standing among the bears is based entirely on the fact that Thoma occasionally links to me. I think that Pigou, Samuelson, […]
The circular flow is a model used to show how money and products move through an economy. I am going to use a simplified version to show the effect of labor share of income on GDP. Many people think that labor income is not quantitatively different than capital income. I will show that the equilibrium […]
A lot of people, especially conservatives, complain about the so-called debasement of the U.S. dollar. For example, Craig R. Smith, who is apparently important enough to be interviewed by “FOX News, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CBN, TBN, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek,” wrote a book last year […]
People see that corporate profits are up, way up. So they wonder, How can there be zombie companies out there if corporate profits are up so much? The answer is in the “rate” of profit, which had been growing since the crisis. But now we see profit rates slowing down. Robert Lenzner of Forbes wrote […]
The notorious GSE bailout will probably cause the US Federal debt to be considerably lower than it would have been without the bailout. It could cause the US Federal debt to be much lower than it would have been, but that won’t be allowed to happen. Fannie and Freddie are now profitable. They are likely […]
Let me start by saying that I do not support the loose monetary policy of Quantitative Easing by the Federal Reserve. Supporters of QE say that it is required because there is so much slack in the economy. They say that we are far below the CBO projection of potential real GDP. Thus, the monetary […]
This post is a follow-up to the article by Felix Santana Garcia, The People Lie Helpless. Here are some photos of areas where the poor live in the Dominican Republic. Granted the poverty there is a result of many years of poor economic guidance in terms of marginal social benefits and marginal social costs. Their […]
I worked with Dwaine Van Vuuren of Recession Alert a few months ago on using the effective demand limit to detect recessions. He said the effective demand limit gave the best detection of a recession he had ever seen. He said he had seen hundreds. I want to show you one graph he came up […]