EconoSpeak

A half century ago today was the first Earth Day, which I paerticipated in while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Although I did not know him well, I even met the founder of the event, then Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.  While it is easy to be discouraged by the ongoing failure to deal with the global warming issue as well as the large amount of rollbacks of reasonable environmental regulations in the US by Donald Trump, with several happening very recently under cover of the...

Yes, earlier this afternoon, very briefly, western Canadian oil was selling for $ -0.15.  At least I saw a report of this.  The price may have been there for only three seconds, but it is the first time I have ever heard of there being negative oil or energy prices ever.  Negative interest rates, which are now quite common are one thing, but negative oil prices?OTOH, some energy related assets have had negative prices before. I am thinking of abandoned coal mines and some highly polluting...

Yesterday morning, after reading the Sunday New York Times, I posted two pieces on EconoSpeak within a few minutes of each other.  One was a short, cute little item (a visual grab from the paper) entitled “The Art of Juxtaposition”; the other was a longer, more substantial takedown of a deficit hysteria “analysis” I called “The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times”.As usual, I monitored the posts through the day to see if they were being picked up anywhere.  This has become largely...

I posted the above chart four days ago in "From Social Distance to Social Justice" to illustrate Arthur Dahlberg's argument about the eventual consequences of a declining labor share of income. Dahlberg was inspired by Stephen Leacock's The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and both Leacock and Dahlberg were influenced by Thorsten Veblen. The chart also illuminates arguments made by Moishe Postone about Marx's theory of capitalist production. I happen to agree substantially with...

Seen in today's New York Times in Print:

The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt.  As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt.  We've been through this many times before, and I have nothing to add.I do want to focus on one sentence, however, to illustrate how intellectual blinders can lead to absurd conclusions.To quote the...

Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Hea viruslth Organization (WHO).  It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the coronavirus and the WHO for supposedly supporting China in their supposedly nefarious conduct, alloeing hin to wallow in  fit of xenophobia as well as accusations against Joe Biden for being "soft on China."  Certainly China was slow to act against the virus, although...

I have previously posted on the highly swingy politicsal nature of southwestern Wisconsin, symbolized by the town there at the mouth of the Wisconsin River, French-founded Prairie du Chien (named for an Indian cheif, it turns out, who was "Dog of the Prairie" in English).  It seems that how SW Wixsonsin goes, so goes the whole state, at least in 2012, 2016, and 2018.Now we can add an election in 2020, that for a seat on the state Supreme Court, where liberal Dem Jill Karofsky from Madison...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly.There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income guarantees. These must be viewed not as...

The St. Louis FED has an economics blog: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruption in economic activity across the globe. Financial markets, in particular, have experienced surges in volatility that had not been seen since the 2007-09 financial crisis … The figure below plots the median value for our measure of credit spreads (the difference between a corporate bond’s yield and a benchmark interest rate on U.S. government securities) at the daily frequency, since the...