by Bradford DeLong (originally published at Grasping Reality with Both Hands) THE DAMNATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL REPUBLICAN POLICY INTELLECTUALS I have long known that the thoughtful and pulls-no-punches Amitabh Chandra has no tolerance for fuzzy thinking from Do-Gooder Democrats. He is one of those who holds that not even a simulacrum of utopia is open […]
“Deeply Disturbing” It’s not a crime if you brag about it on T.V. In fact, it’s hardly worth mentioning. What is this about? “We don’t know the answer, but we hope the inspector general will find out.”
Cartoonist Rob Rogers was fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for refusing to do cartoons extolling the virtues and accomplishments of Trump. According to The Association of American Cartoonists; “Rob Rogers is one of the best in the country and his cartoons have been a wildly popular feature of the Post-Gazette. Readers looked forward each morning […]
Children make the bestest hostages Criticisms of Trump in the business press are especially instructive, because they have no obvious partisan motivation. So Josh Barro’s article at Business Insider this morning, castigating his “bully-and-threaten approach to dealmaking,” is particularly noteworthy. He writes: Donald Trump has a negotiating tactic he really likes: Threaten to do something someone else […]
Does Greg Mankiw Know the History of U.S. Trade Policy? Greg offers us a nice speech by Saint Reagan. While Ronald Reagan preached free trade, Jeffrey Frankel notes that his actual record was rather protectionist. The discussion is an excellent account of how Republicans have been protectionist since 1854. But the really weird thing in Reagan’s discussion was […]
May industrial production: meh Industrial production is the ultimate coincident indicator. It is almost invariably the number that determines economic peaks and troughs. In May it declined -0.1%. While that obviously isn’t a positive, it does nothing to suggest any sort of change of trend: and is in line with any number of similar monthly […]
May retail sales come in strong Real retail sales for May came in strong, up +0.6% just in the month: As the graph shows, this is on trend for the entirety of this expansion, and is also a new high, surpassing that of last winter. Per capita real retail sales also made a new high, […]
Chewing over the message of online job postings Here’s an interesting graph I came across yesterday. It’s from the Conference Board. What it does is track the number of job postings online, and breaks them down between first postings and repeat postings: Let me say first of all that it is of limited use. The […]
Is Strengthening Labor Good for Development? Servaas Storm, who’s always worth reading, has posted on the INET website a summary of a new working paper he coauthored. This issue goes way back with me—I first started looking into and writing about the labor rights/wage/trade/development nexus back in the 1980s. Working on my own, I had a lot […]