EconoSpeak

OK, sorry if this is just over the top, but this evening Trump's close pal, Sean Hannity, has gone over the top both predicting and clearly supporting a full blown attack on Iran, "take out all their nuclear facilities."  Curiously a sign of how over the top this is was given by one of his guests, a colonel, warned that it would take nuclear weapons by the US to fully take out the most deeply buried  Iranian capabilities.I am reasonably certain that part of why Hannity was sounding the war...

Yes.  For centuries throughout the entire world that crucial body of water has been called "the Persian Gulf," even though in 1935 the nation of Persia changed its named to "Iran."  I became aware several decades ago when I was in Saudi Arabia that they have a really big fuss that it should be called "the Arabian Gulf."  I think maybe their fellow Arab GCC members have been supporting this nonsense as well, but nobody else did, certainly not the US.But now here it is, and I had noticed in...

Two days ago in WaPo, Catherine Rampell published a highly reasonable column calling for eliminating the century-old US debt ceiling, something no other nation has ever had, a position supported by a wide array of economists including such a conservative GOP stalwart as the recently deceased Martin Feldstein, a former CEA Chair for Reagan.  I have made numerous posts here on this in the past, but the issue is hot again as once again the debt ceiling is being rapidly approached.The latest...

This may be.  In April DPRK leader Kim Jong Un was finally named "Head of State," more specifically Chair of the Commission for State Affairs.  Implicitly until now that position had been held by his late father, although he has long held certain crucial ruling positions such as head of the ruling party and commander-in-chief.  Nkeconwatch now reports on a July 12 announcment that at the same time in April there was also a rewrite of the North Korean constitution. Nkeconwatch sees certain...

On July 16, 1969, a half century ago today, a Saturn 5 rocket launched from Cape Kennedy on its way to the moon, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land on the moon on July 20 before returning successfully to earth.  Recent books have made clear just how close a call it was with many things nearly going wrong that would have doomed them, including such oddities as Aldrin using a felt tipped pen to adjust a minor switch that was needed for them to return.  My late father played an...

Merriam Webster defines a Potemkin Village as: an impressive facade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition Mike Pence visited a Potemkin Village in Donna, Texas: Pence also visited a tent-like temporary detention facility in Donna, Texas, that holds unaccompanied children and immigrant families. The new and mostly clean facility stood in stark contrast to the McAllen station Pence later visited. While the Buzzfeed story focused on the McAllen station, which depicted...

Probably not, but Turkey is about to receive Russian S-400 missiles against US demands.  More signifigantly the US will kill high level US F-35 agreements, and will not fly US planes over Turkey if it uses the Russian systems.  This threatens Turkish membership in NATO.The immediate result of this in financial markets has been a substantial decline of the Turkish lira over the last several weeks.  While pushing off the US has costs, there will be gains from favoring Russia, from Russian...

This is based on essentially gossip, or if you prefer, a rumor.  I have dining in Washington again and someone there who is in fact both well known and very well informed, but whom I shall not name made a comment about the state of conventional weapons in DPRK and also said that this has not been publicly known.  According to this person their condition is much worse than publicly believed.  So out of date and out of condition are they supposedly that North Korea no longer can seriously...

Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, and J. Bradford Jensen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics provide an interesting discussion of the risks and opportunities from the following: Total US R&D spending as a share of GDP increased slightly from 2.5 percent in 1999 to 2.7 percent in 2016.2 Multinationals are an important driver of aggregate R&D spending in the United States.3 Their share of total US R&D spending was 57 percent in 2015.4 US MNCs play a...

Buried in the Weekend section of the Financial Times is a report that the aggregate value of assets that earn negative nominal yields has substantially expanded since the beginning of 2019 and has reached a new high.  So on January 1, 2019, the value of these assets was at $8.3 trillion.  As of six months later it had reached $13 trillion, a more than 50 percent increase.  There are fewer assets around that have negative yields than a few years ago, but the amount of money in them has grown,...