EconoSpeak

James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending on goods and services. Please read the entire post including some interesting comments. Alas I must be late to the party as I could not provide a reply to an...

It certainly looks like it.Again, for anybody not having seen one of these, a "Poland problem" involves an apparent disconnect between economics and politics, nations with reasonably well performing economies where the populace becomes unhappy and supports opposition, especially "populist" nationalist authoritarian candidates, with 2015 victory in Poland of the Law and Justice Party the poster boy for this, even though Poland has been one of the best performing economies in Europe for quite...

0, 3, 6, 8, 9 and all their permutations.As opposed to straight numbers (1, 4) and hybrids (2, 5, 7).Presented as a public service.

By very strongly and publicly supporting them and dragging the matter to the UN Security Council   Of course, his supporters have been praising his "strong action" in comparison with Obama's quiet approach to the 2009 demonstrations, meant to reduce accusations of the demonstraters being US pawns.  Those demos went on a long time with large numbers eventually killed.  In this case, Trump has made the government's case, and the demos seem to have all but stopped since he took his strong...

Most definitely (hahahahahaha!).Nobody seems to have picked up my coinage yet, but they are suddenly noticing the issue, although unable to label it. Just to be clear, having a "Poland problem" means that a nation's economy has become disconnected from its politics.  Thus Poland is the star transition economy that was the only nation in Europe not experience a decline in GDP in 2009, but its politics have gone sour with an authoritarian, populist, nationalist, and racist government taking...

The alarm has been sounded that Trump’s census apparatchiks are planning to include a citizenship question in the short form that will be used to generate the full count in 2020.  This count, mandated by the constitution and conducted every ten years, is the basis for voting district apportionment and formulas for allocating government services.  Since the first census was taken in 1790 the government has enumerated all residents, citizens or not, and it hasn’t asked about legal status in...

Maybe somewhat, but not as much as Poland does, with a "Poland problem" being where a well performing economy does not prevent political unhappiness.  Iran is experiencing massive demonstrations that are heavily driven by economic complaints, even though economic performance has improved since the adoption and approval of the JCPOA nuclear deal.  Prior to that, in the face of economic sanctions, the Iranian economy was in recession, with GDP actually declining.  Unhappiness with this led to...

I’m a professor at Evergreen State College, currently on leave.  Last year I lived through the events that were captured on videotape and brought the college a lot of unwanted publicity.  As a social scientist, long interested in organization theory and social movements, I found the experience grimly fascinating, an extraordinary case study.  In my writing on it, I try to focus on understanding how such things could occur, rather than apportioning blame to specific individuals, which, from...

This is personal and professional.  My wife and I have the third edition of our comparative economics textbook now in press at MIT Press.  We have chapters on transition economies, and one is on  the Polish economy.  The standard story is that Poland has been the great success story of transition (now accepted to be over pretty much everywhere for awhile now).  It adopted largely western market capitalist institutions successfully, while avoiding mistakes made by other transition economies. ...