EconoSpeak

The push to open the schools, open up everything, ignore CDC gudelines, etc,etc:It's Churchill  --- at Gallipoli!

On July 23, 41-year-old Emmanuel Farhi, Professor of Economics at Harvard, a native of France with Egyptian Jewish ancestry, "unexpectedly" died a few hours after having a Zoom conference on how economics and economists can help the world (or something like that) with fellow Frenchmen, Nobelist Jean Tirole and former IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard.  No one has officially given a cause of death, but the entire internet has decided that it was a suicide, with a long thread with over 800...

Mason ("Mase") Gaffney died on July 26 in Redlands, CA of Covid-19 at age 96.  He was both a great guy as well as arguably what the title to this says: "the last true Georgist economist," with such economists being followers of Henry George, whose 1878 book, Progress and Poverty, was the best-selling book on economics in the US during the 19th century.  George was a journalist who ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York.  His book, drawing on influences from Quesnay and Ricardo, advocated...

Alex Parker reports on a proposal from Representative Darin LaHood: As part of the next round of pandemic relief, House Republicans are pushing new incentives for companies to bring home offshore intellectual property — something that they contend could boost job growth but that critics see as another corporate giveaway … While the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act overhauled the federal tax code and eliminated many of the incentives for offshore income-shifting, it left the structures themselves...

As of the end of this week I completed chairing the 30th annual international conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences, with 54 participants from around the world.  It basically went well, and it was kind of cool to make introductory remarks at 8 AM during EDT, with somebody on at 6 AM their time in Montana and someone else on at 10 PM their time in Sydney, Australia.  It can be done, and even with parallel sessions happening.Of course there were the usual...

It looks like Donald Trump has finally figured out that his only chance is to actually act to help make the pandemic actually get better, and substantially better as in what has been going on in most of Europe and East Asia.  That is the only way he will get his sustained economic growth that he has had on his mind as the key to getting reelected.So in his briefing last night he both stopped repeating fantasies about everything being great and the virus just disappearing, blah blah.  He...

Brad Setser has more to say about how the lack of enforcement with respect to transfer pricing in the Big Pharma sector has not only cost us Federal tax revenues but perhaps in American jobs in his “The Irish Shock to U.S. Manufacturing?” (May 25, 2020): America’s production of pharmaceuticals and medicines peaked in 2006, back before the global financial crisis. Output now is about 20 percent below its 2006 level. Pharmaceuticals tend to be capital not labor intensive. High quality...

I just posted a discussion of an interesting proposal from Biden written by Alex Parker who mentioned some February 5, 2020 testimony from Brad Setser. The gist of this testimony was noted back in a March 26, 2019 blog post entitled When Tax Drives the Trade Data: I often hear that pharmaceuticals are one of America’s biggest exports. But that isn’t what is in the actual trade data (see exhibits 7 & 8). American firms (or formerly American firms, if there has been an inversion) may own...

Alex Parker covers an interesting and important tax policy issue: Former Vice President Joe Biden's recent proposal to secure medical supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic includes tweaks to the 2017 federal tax overhaul, reigniting the debate about whether its international provisions are pushing manufacturing facilities offshore …Former Vice President Joe Biden's recent proposal to secure medical supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic includes tweaks to the 2017...

Seems like more people I know are dying.  In this case it is a good friend of mine and occasional coauthor, the Swedish economist, Tonu Puu, who was born in Estonia of an Estonian father and a mother of German ancestry.  As it was, he ended up speaking a very large number of languages, as well as being very cosmopolitan in many other ways. He was 83 years old and had cancer for some time, which is what I presume he did of, although the announcement did not specify a cause, but it happened...