Noah Smith made a thought-provoking statement on twitter, “Sometimes I wonder what actually causes recessions.” He received a slew of responses. While one could point to many causes, including tight money and the beats of butterfly wings, I look primarily to the dynamics of productivity. Here is a graph of year-over-year productivity growth… You will […]
Is it just me, or did Joni Ernst just effectively announce that she wants to kill farm subsidies? Of course, how effectively she announced it will depend on whether her opponent, Bruce Braley, picks up this ball and runs with it. Although maybe she’s talking about something else she thinks is pork. Be careful what […]
Linda Beale announced her return to blogging after the death of her husband here. (Dan here…Welcome back to blogging Linda.) by Linda Beale The result of taxpayers’ financial bailout of GMAC GMAC, as most of you likely know, was General Motors’ financial group. GMAC had originated as a means for the auto company to […]
Indeed, they are; state and local governments are closer to the people. It’s just that the people they’re closer to probably aren’t, well … you. So, here’s a question: Why isn’t, say, Kay Hagan, who’s running against the Speaker of the State House*, or Charlie Crist, who’s running against Florida governor Rick Scott, um, mentioning this in their […]
By way of the show Boom-Bust, we have an interview with Jim Bruce on the future of Fed Policy. (interview starts at 14:40) He does not see the Fed rate lifting off next year. He does not see easy Fed policy avoiding an economic downturn. He says Fed has been unable to generate inflation at […]
John Cochrane is developing a model for the Fisher Effect to explain that raising the nominal central bank rate could lead to higher inflation, not lower inflation as many say. Nick Rowe complements the model with a simpler “model”. And Steve Williamson has been an ever-present force for the Fisher Effect. I too have written […]
In the Solow Growth Model, productivity is a powerful factor for raising income per person in a country. So it is important to maintain productivity growth if a country would like to have economic growth. I have written recently that there are ways to discipline the market in order to achieve greater productivity and thus […]
And this is an honest question, one that I have been poking around in but maybe don’t have the chops to answer. Lets take three measures of Public Debt: One nominal. Public Debt as of the 16th was $17.899 trillion. And rising. Two as percentage of GDP. And BTW the preferred measure of deficit fetishists […]
Yesterday Credit Suisse released its Global Wealth Databook 2014 to go along with the Global Wealth Report issued Monday. Global wealth hit another new record of $263 trillion as of mid-2014, up 8.3% from mid-2013 (Report, p. 3). Rich people are doing well, but how about the middle class? One measure of this is median […]