EconoSpeak

Yesterday my wife Marina and I mt with our personal attorney, a close friend also, to fix  some loose ends in our wills due to some recent family deaths, as well the current situation.  He also happens to sit on the Harrisonburg City Council, as well as having been Mayor for awhile and a longtime member of the city Planning Commission, someone whose competence we have great respect for.  Anyway, he noted that on April 14 the City Manager is to present a proposed budget to the City Council,...

Quite possibly.In today's Washington Post, p. A8, Robin Dixon and David L. Stern report that President Voloymyr Zelensky has removed anti-corruption General Prosecutor Ruslan Ryaboshapka and is replacing him with Uryna Venedkiktova.  She is associated with the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who has long been the main backer of President Zelensky and who had his control of a major bank removed previously.  Observers have long viewed Zelensky''s connection with Kolomoisky as a danger point in his...

On 3/13/20 in Foreign Policy Focus, Ariel Gold and Medea Benjamin argue that to improve the global coronavirus problem, sanctions on Iran should be lifted, quite aside from the fact they should never have been imposed in the first place as Iran was adhering to the JCPOA nuclear deal.The effect of the sanctions has been to tank the Iranian economy, including its health care sector, much worsening the coronavirus epidemic in Iran, thus making it more likely to spread to the global pandemic....

We are in the middle of a flurry of decision-making on how to deal with COVID-19.  After much resistance, officials are now canceling public events, closing schools and discouraging other activities that put us in contact with each other.  Travel restrictions and possible shutdowns of workplaces, as we’ve seen in Italy, may be up next.It’s interesting we haven’t heard anything about benefit-cost analysis in all this.  Nearly all economists profess to think that BCA is the single best...

As I listened to the morning news about the coronavirus crisis, I was reminded of this critique of the Eurozone: In a recent conference, the distinguished economist Paul Krugman repeated the oft-heard critique that the eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Waltraud Schelkle disagrees with this characterisation, and argues that no country or group of countries represents an optimal currency area – one region or country always loses out from a single monetary policy. But countries can use...

As discussed in an earlier post it looks like there is an as yet undetermined compromise between the ACA plus public option with some other items supported by Joe Biden that unfortunately lacks the crucial matter of universal health care coverage (although he professes to support such) with the single payer plan supported by Bernie Sanders, somewhat modeled on the system of Canada, although more generous and less open to private insurance than Canada's but definitely including universal...

That is what I just saw on an internet report, with 30-year Treauries supposedly especiallly hard hit. Rather stunning was a figure showing trading costs, which have supposedly massively spiked in the last week or so, reaching the highest levels since 2008.  Apparently this may be tied to exceptionally high volatility in the bond markets, especially the long term ones, which may explain it, although this has not bee much reported, I guess with so much attention on the volatile and mostly...

Several days ago, McCoy Tyner died at age 81.  He was one of the greatest living jazz pianists at the time of his death, with perhaps only Keith Jarrett his serious rival, although others might beg to differ.He was most  famous for having been the pianist in John Coltane's "classic quartet," along with Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.  Their most famous album was "A Love Supreme," one of the greatest jazz albums of them all.  He also produced a prodigious body of excellent...

This is not a prediction. Only an observation. From 1952 to 1996, U.S. nominal net worth of households and non-profits tracked nominal GDP pretty closely. Net worth remained pretty close to 15 times GDP. That consistent relationship ended after 1997. In the third quarter of 2007, net worth was nearly 20 times GDP but by the second quarter of 2009 it had reverted to just 17 times GDP. One might argue that it was roughly 15 times what trend GDP would have been at that time.In the second...

Today, March 8, is International Womens' Day, recognized as such by the United Nations since 1975.  But probably a majority of American women have never even heard of it, much less celebrate it.  There have been marches on it (or around it) here in Harrisonburg, VA for the last four years, but these have been small and led by women born outside the US, with most of the native born participants highly educated and very progressive politically, the latter very much the case for most native...