Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Where is the puzzling growth in service jobs coming from?

Where is the puzzling growth in service jobs coming from? Continuing with my week of follow-up stories based on last Friday’s jobs report, I noted last Friday that there was a completely anomalous upwards revision of nearly 100,000 jobs in the last 8 months of 2019. This after a -500,000 decrease, based on full data, […]

Does America Hate Its Children?

December 2012,  Robert Reich wrote about America’s children   .   .   .    Remember the Children. “America’s children seem to be shortchanged on almost every issue we face as a society. Not only are we failing to protect our children from deranged people wielding semi-automatic guns. We’re not protecting them from poverty. The […]

My “official” first half forecast for 2020

by New Deal democrat My “official” first half forecast for 2020 My short term 6 month forecast has been posted at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over and reading should be educational for you, and puts un poco dinero in my pocket.

Does the United States Have a Progressive Future?

Spoiler alert:  maybe. The surprising success of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, widespread protests against Trump, and the election of a number of highly progressive candidates in the 2018 midterms all seem to suggest a progressive turning point in American politics.  At the very least, the intellectual stranglehold of right-wing economic ideas on our political […]

News and Words that Caught My Eye this Week

“Teacher of the Year‘ kneels during college football championship attended by Trump,”ABC News, January 16, 2020 During a ceremony honoring the 2019 “Teachers of the Year,” one in particular stood out. The honoree from Minnesota, Kelly Holstine, chose to kneel during the national anthem at the NCAA football championship game on Monday, where the ceremony […]

Long Bond Yields vs The Long Wave

Different  bloggers  have been posting their favorite charts of 2019 this January.  So I decided to post my favorite chart of the past 20, or more, “years of the long bond yield versus the long run trend.”  Bond yields are now below their long run trend and may be at or near a secular bottom.  […]

Summing Up the Last Decade

To steal from Sandwichman’s excellent commentary on 2020 Hindsight and use a quotation from it which does give the magnitude of the last 10 years in financial terms; “A fourth wave of debt began in 2010 and debt has reached $55 trillion in 2018, making it the largest, broadest and fastest growing of the four” […]

2020 Hindsight: Why the world is not zero-sum

According to a report, Global Waves of Debt, pre-published by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development: Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. In emerging and developing countries, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The first three waves ended in […]

Marking my 2019 forecast to market

by New Deal democrat Marking my 2019 forecast to market One of the things I do at the end of every year, in the interest of transparency, is to go back and see how my 6 and 12 month forecasts for the year panned out. So how did I do this year? Not perfect, but […]

The field was rigid and closed until Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View opened the debate to all comers

Noah Smith’s The End of Econ Blogging’s Golden Age, Bloomberg Opinion. December 17, 2019. “If someone asked you to name the greatest economics blogger of all time, you might name Paul Krugman, or my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen. But there’s a third name that deserves to be on that short list: Mark Thoma, an […]