Just yesterday I posted about how weak real wages in Japan spells trouble for Abenomics. (link) Today we see by way of Stanley White and Leika Kihara at Reuters that output in Japan might be showing recession. “Output is clearly weakening, enough to make you even wonder if the economy is OK,” said Yoshiki Shinke, […]
Janet Yellen said today that there is still considerable slack in the economy in terms of labor and capital. So there is less pressure to tighten monetary policy earlier. Just for the record, from my own research there is little spare capacity left… Here is my graph… Warning! The potential GDP used in the graph […]
One economic variable that I track is the percentage of capital income used for consumption. It is not an exact number but an estimate in order to see trends over time. With the new revisions to GDP out today, I will update this variable. I have previously said that consumption by capital income would drop […]
Years of >5% Growth: Pre-Reagan? 15 Post-Reagan? 5 Post-80s-recession-recovery? 2 Cross-posted at Asymptosis.
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 […]