Just when I thought I had finally gotten out they pull me back in. Matt Yglesias , Tyler Cowen and Kevin Drum have noticed that US GDP growth picked up exactly when US austerity stopped (as I noted here). The pattern is so strong that it looks similar even though Yglesias, Drum and I graph […]
Sorry to bother angrybears, but I must confess I can’t stop looking at the same 20 data points. A pointless post not up to angrybear standards post is here (it is a follow up of the equally pointless post here)
by Barkley Rosser at Econospeak Has The Oil Price Drop Come To An End? Very likely. Reports from November report that the Saudi government has been preparing its budget for the price of oil to be between $45 and $50 per barrel. The price rose during the last two days and fell slightly today, with […]
Gail Tverberg offers her view on possible ramifications of the severe drop in prices for oil and debt financed growth: There are really two different problems that a person can be concerned about: Peak oil: the possibility that oil prices will rise, and because of this production will fall in a rounded curve. Substitutes that […]
PGL at Econospeak points us to declining expenditures for education: …Bill McBride has been leading the discussion on state fiscal austerity including this from a few months ago: the public sector has declined significantly since Mr. Obama took office (down 657,000 jobs). These job losses have mostly been at the state and local level, but more recently at […]
Carter, Begin, Sadat, Brezhnev, and Deng are all long gone. Rumor has it that the last political icon of Tim Curry’s only pop hit has joined them. Or has he? The death of Fidel Castro, 88, has also often been mistakenly declared before on social media and this time may have been confused with the […]
Yves Smith points us to additional 114th Congress changes: How the Republican Campaign to Gut Dodd Frank is a Huge Gimmie to Banks and Private Equity Funds The Republicans have been quick and shameless in using their control of both houses to try to crank up the financial services pork machine into overtime operation. The […]
In the latest episode of Barack Unbound, the Obama administration has announced an important executive initiative. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will cut the fee it charges to insure mortgages from 1.35% of the value of the mortgage to 0.85%. It will also try to encourage lenders to relax lending standards. I suspect that this […]
I am wondering why the rate of US house construction remains so low. I see two candidate explanations. The first is that lending standards remain very tight — the mortgage lenders having been very badly burnt once remain twice shy. The other is that potential house buyers no longer perceive owner occupied housing to be […]