"I guarantee you…" pic.twitter.com/HRjKjtrziV — Bad COVID-19 Takes (@BadCOVID19Takes) November 23, 2020

Benjamin Franklin vs. John Locke on the Legislature vs. the Executive An initial note: there is very little economic data this week. Some house price information gets updated tomorrow, and then on Wednesday we get a slew of data, including Q3 corporate profits, jobless claims, new home sales, durable goods orders, and personal income and […]

Janet Yellen Will Be Treasury Secretary  I have long been a great fan of hers as well as knowing her and her husband, George Akerlof, personally.  Back in 2009 I was the first person to call for her to be named Fed Chair. I am very pleased with this appointment.  This is as good as […]

The good mayor of El Paso is at wit’s end. He is worrying himself into the grave. The City’s hospitals and morgues are overflowing. Seems that the people have to work to eat, and, if they work, they get the virus and get sick, and, too many die. Damned capitalism is as deadly as the […]

(Dan here,,,I think worth looking at in American Affairs) New Fault Lines in a Post-Globalized World By Marshall Auerback and Jan Ritch-Frel November 20, 2020The economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic has upended the global economic system and, just as importantly, cast out the neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated the industrialized world for the past forty […]

Jobless claims: the beginning of a pandemic reversal?   This week’s new jobless claims rose from last week’s pandemic lows, while continued jobless claims again declined to new pandemic lows. On an unadjusted basis, new jobless claims rose by 18,264 to 743,460. Seasonally adjusted claims rose by 31,000 to 742,000. The 4 week moving average, […]

 – by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 16 – 20 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Nothing definitive yet – after all weekly data is going to be noisy – but there is some indication that the recovery in coincident conditions in the economy have ceased to make […]

Coronavirus dashboard for November 20: North Dakota “leads” the world Total US infections: 11,715,316* Average last 7 days: 165,029/day (new record high = 1 out of every 2000 Americans infected per day!) Total US deaths: 252,535 Average last 7 days: 1,335/day Source: COVID Tracking Project *confirmed cases only: I suspect the total number is on […]

John Locke: decisionmaking by standing rules set in advance is a foundational requirement for civil government John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government,” published in 1690 just after and in support of the Glorious Revolution, is the founding philosophical document of modern liberal representative democracies. In it he anticipates John Rawls’s “original position.” Locke argues that […]