EconoSpeak

Lawrence Summers made an interesting comments during a CNBC interview: Former Treasury Secretary and Obama administration economic advisor Larry Summers said Friday that recent employee bonuses are stunts and not reflective of long-term hopes for prosperity that tax cuts are supposed to bring. "I think it's a gimmick," Summers told CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "I think in many cases the firms have to raise wages because labor markets are tight, and so why not curry some favor with the White House...

Maybe yes.In Davos some days ago Treasury Secretary Mnuchin declared that a lower valued dollar would lead to a lower US trade deficit. The dollar promptly fell several percents and various persons and many observers reacted in horror, most prominently former TreasSec Larry Summers.  He did no actually dispute Mnuchin's claim factually, rather he asserted that people holding that position as he did should follow a strong dollar policy and talk it up, that a lower dollar raises prices of...

Josh Marshall listens to Donald Trump so we do not have to: President Trump has been out bragging that “because of my policies” the African-American unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest level ever. This appears to be technically true. But I thought it made sense to give some context for the nonsensical nature of this claim. As you can see, the idea that this is “because of my policies” is a bit hard to square with the actual data. Josh provides the data on the black unemployment...

The following was sent out to the all-faculty-and-staff email list at Evergreen State College today by the chief of campus police.  Some background: The Evergreen State College is abbreviated as TESC and is situated in Thurston County. A faculty member reported that a person phoned her campus phone impersonating a Thurston County Sheriff.  The person advised them to take money out of their account and go to a local store and wire them the money, otherwise they would be arrested.  THIS IS A...

As argued in numerous posts here, we have seen an apparently emerging disconnect between economic conditions and political outcomes in a variety of nations, with anti-immigrant or more generally nationalist or populist parties with authoritarian tendencies gaining strength in many nations despite apparently improving or even largely pretty good economic conditions.  A list of those showing this includes Poland, the US, Germany, UK with the Brexit vote, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, and...

I have seen nobody claim this, and this may simply be a matter of collateral damage, as Trump has officially approved of the recent openings related to the forthcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea, especially since South Korean President Moon went out of his way to give credit to Trump publicly for this opening, credit Trump publicly accepted.  It is probably more that Trump simply is not thinking, but it is also the case that he had previously dissed moves by Moon to follow a more...

The argument here is that a nation with a Poland problem has a disconnect between its economic conditions and its political  outcomes.  It could be argued that in such a case the voters of that nation may realize that elected leaders (especially presidents in the US) have much less control over economic outcomes than voters in most nations give them credit or blame for.  So they vote on other issues.Of course in many such cases, notably the US and Poland itself, those issues seem to revolve...

Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution has provided a link to a 2004 article from Washington Monthly by Fred Kaplan that lays out in great detail how George W. Bush, strongly backed by Cheney and Rumsfeld and against the views of Colin Powell, undid the agreement that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton made with the North Koreans in 1994 to shut down the North's plutonium production program for nuclear weapons.  I have blogged on tis here previously, but this article included more details than I had...

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...