EconoSpeak

In the history of antitrust law, one of the most important rulings by the US Supreme Court came in 1945, when the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), long based in Pittsburgh with heavy Mellon family ownership, was ordered broken up for being a monopoly, following a ruling by Judge Learned Hand.  This was the famous "per se" ruling that said that simple domination of an industry by size was sufficient in the end to justify breaking it up.  However, with the entry of Reynolds and Kaiser into...

Chinese tariffs on US soybean exports have now kicked in, with China half the US soybean market, and exports much more important for soybeans than for corn, with the US producing half the world's corn, but exporting less of it than soybeans.  Upshot is that while soybean prices have fallen roughly 20% since Trump started his trade war, corn prices have fallen noticeably less.Recognizing that soybeans are very important in some key pro-Trump states like Iowa, North Dakota, and Indiana, he has...

Josh Marshall provides a nice discussion of the difference between how NATO is funded versus how much each of its members spends on national defense, which begins with: As we move toward the NATO Summit and the Putin-Trump summit, I thought it made sense to review some of the details behind the President’s demands that NATO member countries pay up and stop doing what he regards as freeloading on the US taxpayer dime. Most people have a general sense that Trump doesn’t seem to grasp how an...

Perhaps no topic generates such bewilderment between economists and the general public as the monetary valuation of human life, or the value of a statistical life (VSL) to use the term preferred by professional economists.  Economists insist that longevity is a commodity bought and sold on markets like anything else, which means it has a price and an underlying schedule of willingness to pay just as we would find for any other good or service.  Most noneconomists regard this as madness:...

Dr. Joseph Francois and Laura M. Baughman are being criticized for writing: This policy brief examines the potential net impacts on U.S. jobs across all industries of the proposed steel and aluminum tariffs applied to targeted steel and aluminum imports from all countries. It does not take into account any potential retaliation against U.S. exports; only of the tariffs themselves. We find that the tariffs would indeed have positive impacts on U.S. steel and aluminum producers, but negative...

Scott Pruitt increasingly looks the worst of the worst out of the appalling cabinet of President Trump, quite aside from his race to become the single most corrupt cabinet member in the entire history ofthe US.  The latter is trivial compared to his policy change after policy change that will increase pollution in the environment and end up killing people, to be blunt about it.  But now the Environmental Economics blog reports that since June 7 Pruitt's EPA has been planning to distort...

 David Gelles interviewed Richard and Holly Branson for The New York Times Saturday David Gelles (NYT): What do you think those in positions of power should do to address social problems like income inequality?  Richard Branson: A basic income should be introduced in Europe and in America. It’s great to see countries like Finland experimenting with it in certain cities. It’s a disgrace to see people sleeping on the streets with this material wealth all around them. And I think with...

Excerpts from "The Effect of an Eight Hours' Day on Wages and the Unemployed" by  Charles Beardsley, Jr. (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Jul., 1895), pp. 450-459):The argument of workingmen that the general adoption of an eight hours' day would raise wages and absorb the unemployed is well known. A reduction in hours of work would be equivalent to the withdrawal from the ranks of men now employed of a certain number of laborers. The gap thus made would be filled by the...

In my Take Back ICE, I wrote: I would hope the leaders of ICE would speak up and strongly object to what the Demagogue in Chief has done with their agency but to date they seem to be intimated from doing what is right. Some good news: The political backlash against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has turned so intense that leaders of the agency’s criminal investigative division sent a letter last week to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen urging an organizational...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established 15 years ago: ICE was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9/11. Leveraging those authorities, ICE has become a powerful and sophisticated federal law enforcement agency. My link was for a 2013 discussion of its laudable achievements during its first ten years. As a resident of New York City, I appreciated ICE. On...