I worked with Dwaine Van Vuuren of Recession Alert a few months ago on using the effective demand limit to detect recessions. He said the effective demand limit gave the best detection of a recession he had ever seen. He said he had seen hundreds. I want to show you one graph he came up […]
Menzie Chinn over at Econbrowser posted on low inflation today. His argument is that there is still lots of slack from real GDP being way below potential real GDP and from high unemployment. The idea is that abundant slack depresses prices. Inflation is generated as slack capacity is utilized. It’s the normal result of labor market […]
People need money. That is the purpose of the Fed’s loose monetary policy. But there is no transmission mechanism that gets money into the hands of people. Money is predominantly created in the economy through loans and credit from banks. Banks have to make loans or extend credit in order for people to have more […]
This is an article published yesterday by an acquaintance of mine who lives in the Dominican Republic, Felix Santana Garcia. He writes a weekly article for an online newspaper there. (I translated the article from Spanish.) The People Lie Helpless By FELIX SANTANA GARCIA * The author is a financial manager and university professor. Living […]
On June 10th, 2009, Paul Krugman gave a lecture at the London School of Economics on how economics should be taught differently after the crisis. (It was actually the third lecture over 3 days. All 3 lectures are available on youtube and I highly recommend them even after 4 years.) Paul Krugman made 3 references […]
Today Paul Krugman wrote a piece (and a blog post) about China’s high level of investment in the face of low domestic consumption. It is obvious to me that he is making headway in understanding the importance of low labor share of income. Remember low labor share means high capital share. Capital income is dedicated […]
The subject of potential real GDP is important. As Paul Krugman had a post entitled, “Potential Mistakes”. Today Dean Baker had a post entitled, “GDP Growth Remains Below Potential Growth”. Paul Krugman said, “It is important to have an idea of how much the economy could and should be producing, and also of how low […]
Edward Lambert at Effective Demand; Effective Demand = Effective Labor Income/(cu*(1-u)) points to the result of an economy left to maximize Profits at the expense of Labor. I have my own version or underlying causes of this issue and Edward gives the economic side of it. I am going to show a graph of Productivity […]