EconoSpeak

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has a plan to get Saudi Arabia off oil, with an immediate push to create 1.2 million private sector jobs by 2020.  However, as Juan Cole reports, his political crackdown last year in which over 300 people were tossed in jail  for various supposed crimes, with many of them now having frozen bank accounts and other restrictions placed on them, has somewhat scuttled this project badly.  700,000 foreign workers have left,and foreign direct investment...

So Sean Hannity would have us believe this evening after the press conference earlier today by Trump and EU Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker.  According to Hannity they have signed a "deal" that will help US businesses, workers, and farmers. Yowzah!As it is, what appears to have been agreed to (no signed deal) is that the US will not impose tariffs on autos imported from the EU as he had threatened to,  a proposal not supported by the US auto industry, the erstwhile beneficiary of such an...

And maybe dairy farmers as well.  As suggested in a recent post here, indeed it will be by using the Commodity Credit Corporation, and Trump has announced a $12 billion package, starting in September, two months before the mid-term elections.  That is not quite the estimated $14 billion expected to be lost due to retaliatory tariffs on US soybean farmers, although it would cover a lot, although reportedly also hurting US dairy farmers will also get some of that action, which would reduce the...

Shinobu Hashmoto just died at age 100. His original screenplay for the greatest movie ever made in Japan was initially written while he was recovering in a Japanese hospital for war veterans.with him having tuberculosis. It is famous for showing how different observers of reality may have different views of that reality. The film's director was Kurowsawa, who worked closely with Hashimoto on many of his films. Regarding the greatest of them all, "Rashomon," even though now many see it as...

No, folks, it was not the much ballyhooed issue of Russian election interference in 2016, which got so much attention because of Trump's bungled and false statements at the press conference.  Oh yes, for those of us who are convinced he is a bought out stooge of Putin, this all was very delicious, but it was far from the most important issue dealt with in Helsinki.As always, the most important issue between Russia and the US is nuclear weapons, not Ukraine or NATO expansion eastward or even...

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...