…Corporations. Since earnings season is now well underway, I decided to look at the breakdown of aggregate domestic income (gross domestic income). Corporate profits are up 44.7% since the outset of the US recovery, while wages and salary accruals are up just 0.9%. The chart above illustrates the peak-trough losses (total loss), trough-Q2 2010 gains […]
Dean Baker finds gaping holes in deficit hawk rhetoric using the simple accounting identity that national saving must equal the current account (S-I = CA). If the domestic private-sector’s desire to save is positive, then the only way for the public sector (i.e., government) to net save is for the economy as a whole to […]
Update: one of our readers caught a mistake in the chart. I indexed the data to December 2008, or one year after the recession actually started in December 2007. The statistics that changed are formatted in bold, and the chart in the article has been updated. The analysis doesn’t change at all, but the number […]
The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan are considering further quantitative easing. It’s an explicit statement, as with the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, or implied by the fact that the foreign exchange intervention will eventually be sterilized if the policy rule is not changed, as with the […]
Moderator is John Holdren, Science and Technology Advisor to President Barack Obama and Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Participants are: Nadia K. Al Dossary, Chief Executive Officer and Partner, Al Sale Eastern Co. Ltd Gary Hattem, President, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Deutsche Bank Tri Mumpuni, Executive Director, IBEKA Conrad van Oostrom, […]
In a NY Times op-ed, Rob Parenteau and Yves Smith reminded us that the private sector financial balance is a function of the household financial balance and the corporate financial balance. They concluded the following regarding excess corporate saving: So instead of pursuing budget retrenchment, policymakers need to create incentives for corporations to reinvest their […]
What’s your answer? “Thinking about the past few decades… to the best of your knowledge, which ONE of the following U.S. Presidents do you think did the best job of managing the economy?” Bill Clinton Ronald Reagan Barack Obama Lyndon B. Johnson George W. Bush Richard Nixon That’s question #11 of the the Allstate-National Journal […]
Earlier this week I compared household saving rates across the US, UK, Canada, and Germany. My conclusion was pretty simple: So generally, this simple analysis would suggest that Menzie Chinn’s skepticism of a “status quo” of US consumer imports is worthy. But with the status quo firmly in place in Germany, the household saving data […]
Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser breaks down US import data by sector to argue the following (see entire article here): What is clear is that consumer goods do not vary that much; now, part of auto and auto parts is going to satisfy consumer demand as well, and here we do have some evidence in support […]
Spanning the period April 14, 2010 to June 7, 2010, the euro lost 12.5% in value against the $US (this is not a trade-weighted measure of the currency value, but it’ll do). As the currency tumbled, Q2 nominal export income grew quickly over the quarter for the top 5 economies in the Eurozone: Germany, 6% […]