by Joseph Joyce The BRICS and the Bretton Woods Twins The World Cup was not the only event of global significance to take place in Brazil this summer. The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa met in the city of Fortaleza and announced the formation of two new financial institutions. One is […]
The 2014 Medicare Trustees Report has just been released, and it shows that the program is on noticeably sounder financial footing than it was just a year ago. One of the biggest signs of this is that the projected depletion date of the Hospital Insurance (Part A) Trust Fund has been pushed back by four […]
The idea of democracy is to give the people what they want, right? Ezra Klein points us to a great study by Ray LaRaja and Brian Schnaffer examining policy preferences by political donors (5% of the population) vs. non-donors (95%). Here’s my rendition of the results: Whose preferences would you say are embodied in our current government? […]
I wrote last November that the success of Abenomics in Japan would depend on raising labor’s share of income faster than inflation. Basically real wages need to rise. I would now add that real wages need to rise faster than productivity. The key is to raise effective demand with healthier consumption demand. So we see […]
You know we have talked about this at the state legislature before, nullification. But, bottom line is, as U.S. Senator why should we be passing laws that the states are considering nullifying? Bottom line: our legislators at the federal level should not be passing those laws. We’re right…we’ve gone 200-plus years of federal legislators going […]
When Keynes wrote about Effective Demand in Chapter 3 of General Theory… he tied the limit of effective demand to the maximization of profits. Currently I see the economy reaching the effective demand limit by the end of 2014. Is there a sign that profits are maximizing? Here is Gina Martin Adams of Wells Fargo […]
Mark Cook is an investor who uses his own proprietary indicator to assess the stock market. He saw the crashes of 1987, 2000 and 2007. (article from WSJ Market Watch) He is seeing the stock market going into strange territory at the moment. “It’s like being in the Twilight Zone, he says. “Imagine going outside […]
The Countdown is ON! (Update 2: It’s out, links work. See you in Comments) (Update for Post Publication) If things go as scheduled the 2014 Report of the Trustees of Social Security will be released to the web at 12:15 Easter or less than two hours from the time this post published. Assuming the same […]
After taking a nearly-month-long hiatus from blogging here about legal issues, and blogging only very lightly about other things, I posted this controversial post last Friday and participated in a lengthy comments thread. The final comment of mine, in reference to some of the preceding comments of others and of mine, reads: A final point on this […]