A simple rule of economic arithmetic that economists seem to studiously ignore: Inflation transfers real buying power from creditors to debtors, with nary an account transfer visible anywhere on anyone’s account books. Inflation means that debtors pay off their loans over time with less-valuable dollars — dollars that can’t buy as much bread, butter, and […]
Thomas Piketty’s important new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, predicts a bleak future of increasing concentrations of financial assets in few hands, stagnant wages and labor share of income, and declining returns to capital — secular stagnation. He enunciates and demonstrates the part of Marx that Marx got exactly right. But Dean Baker points out where […]
Inflation forecasts in the Livingston survey of experts are systematically different from inflation and thus do not correspond to the hypothesis of rational expectations and a quadratic loss function. One striking feature of the forecast errors is that the averages over decades of the median over participants forecast error are dramatically different from zero and […]
Just read Bryce Covert’s excellent post criticizing welfare reform. It is too good to excerpt.
I would like to ask a question of the readers for their comments. Has aggressive monetary policy made labor less valuable? The idea is that cheap money for so long to investors has made profits easier to obtain, and that labor was not valued and rewarded as a means to produce profits. Therefore, wages held […]
Oh, my — not only was Paul Ryan’s hunger=dignity speech appalling on the merits, the anecdote he used to make his point was fake — a distortion of a real story with a completely different point. I’m actually not happy with this discovery; the crucial point here should be that even if the story of the kid who wants […]
Lifted from comments to Calculated Risks aside on cash for clunkers. Spencer says: I get so tired of seeing people evaluate the cash of clunkers and ignoring the impact on auto inventories. During the cash for clunkers auto and light truck inventories fell from 2.7 months of sales to1.6 months of sales — the norm […]
During the late sixties, myself and a bunch of other older teenagers 18 years and older arrived at McAfees on Van Buren in Chicago, IL. Quite a few of us were drafted. I enlisted in the USMC at the age of 19 without knowing completely what my life was going to be like for the […]
OXON HILL, Md. – New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gave a rousing speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference today taking on President Obama while stressing his own conservative credentials. Christie’s signature tough talking style was on full display when he took on Obama asking, “Mr. President, what the hell are we paying you for?” […]