Yves Smith asks …I’ll throw it out to you: what do you deem the odds of Euro breakup to be (with “breakup” defined as at least one country exiting the Eurozone) in the next month? In the next six months? And if you think it will come apart, but later, guesstimate how much later and […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Human Capital Edition In the past six weeks I have talked to and with health care executives and practitioners from at least 40 states. All of the conversations have been interesting to say the least. What I hear from the hospital and (integrated) health system levels is the […]
Coming at this question from my typical perspective: a business owner facing a national economy. You start a business vermont selling high-quality furniture. You’ve developed a new chair that’s better than the other chairs on the market. (Think: the Herman Miller Aeron Chair.) Say you’re planning to sell it for $700. (You can’t sell it […]
by Mike Kimel The two luckiest people in American politics today are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Each is running against a politician whose accomplishments while an elected head of the executive branch are a disappointment even to most of his own supporters. If they were running against anyone else, they’d probably both go down […]
by Rebecca Wilder Euro Area Inflation: A Very Slow Burn Euro area consumer prices increased at a 2.4% annual pace in May, down 0.2 ppt from the 2.6% pace in April. Core inflation fell to 1.8% in May from 1.9% in April. Headline and core inflation peaked in the fourth quarter of 2011, and disinflation […]
In an email exchange between Dan and me on Tuesday, I wrote: Btw, the Supreme Court has been amazingly slow this term in issuing opinions in high-profile cases. Most of the opinions they’ve issued recently are on pretty esoteric issues; they’re important, but pretty inside-baseball. A good example is an opinion they issued yesterday. Here’s […]
by Kenneth Thomas Guest post: Why the World Should Care About America’s Middle Class Tim Worstall, in his Forbes blog, attacks my series (here and here) on whether globalization is good for America’s middle class. Not on the basis that he disagrees with my conclusion (though he does), but because, he argues, there are much […]
by Kenneth Thomas Guest Post: Is globalization good for America’s middle class? Part 2 In Part 1, I examined what economic theory has to say about the winners and losers from trade. The main conclusion is based on the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem: Because the United States is labor scarce in a global perspective, an expansion of […]
The Fed’s credibility is obviously important. If people believe that they can and will do what they say they’re going to do — and that it will have the desired effect — they can affect the the real economy (at least short-term) by just making promises — Open Mouth Operations. (Though they must actually do […]