Real-World Economics Review

from Dean Baker During the campaign Donald Trump boasted that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t affect his standing among his supporters. Whether or not this is true, this appears to be the approach that Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking to their role in governing. The basic story is that they can rip off the public as much as they want, because ain’t no one going to stop them. They could be right. The most immediate issue is Trump’s refusal to sell his...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar In today’s troubled times, mega-mergers are the norm. Announcements of marriages like that between AB Inbev and SABMiller in the beer industry or Bayer and Monsanto in the agribusiness sector attract attention that soon fades, even as the difficult task of getting clearances from the regulators continues. But the just announced agreement to merge by AT&T and Time Warner, in a $85 billion deal, is likely to remain in public discussion for some time. If it does...

from David Ruccio The total income reported on the top 400 individual tax returns rose 20 percent in 2014, according to Internal Revenue Service (pdf) data released last Thursday.   The figures reveal the concentration of earnings at the summit of the income distribution, in a club that required $126.8 million of adjusted gross income to enter. That tiny group, out of nearly 150 million tax returns in 2014, took home $175.5 million on average (that’s in 1990 dollars) and 1.3 percent of...

from Asad Zaman Fifth Post in a sequence on Re-Reading Keynes. Chapter 1 of General Theory is just one paragraph, displayed in full HERE Briefly: Keynes writes that Classical Economics is a special case of his General Theory. Furthermore, the assumptions required for the special case do not hold for contemporary economic societies,”with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience” The discussion below borrows...

from Dean Baker Harvard professor, textbook author, and occasionally New York Times columnist Greg Mankiw told readers today that Donald Trump’s economic team is wrong to worry about the trade deficit. “The most important lesson about trade deficits is that they have a flip side. When the United States buys goods and services from other nations, the money Americans send abroad generally comes back in one way or another. One possibility is that foreigners use it to buy things we produce,...

Brexit, TrumpKKK, the EU – broadly defined labour markets are key. About this: A. Noah Smith is changing his opinion A job is more than a paycheck. It is a social institution, too Debunking labour economics 101 (very clever but also logical and empirical) B. Frances Coppola is not changing her opinion: ‘Reinventing work for the future'(about basic income) C. The Daily Mail wants to change your opinion, about this (graph) Source: ONS. The non-far right should not leave it to the Daily Mail...

from David Ruccio In the second installment of this series on “class before Trumponomics,” I argued that, in recent decades, while American workers have created enormous wealth, most of the increase in that wealth has been captured by their employers and a tiny group at the top—as workers have been forced to compete with one another for new kinds of jobs, with fewer protections, at lower wages, and with less security than they once expected. And the period of recovery from the Second...

from The Guardian   “the world’s leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many” . . . the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger...

from Dean Baker In spite of the hopes of many elite types for a last-minute resurrection, it appears that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is finally dead.  This is good news, but it took a long time to kill the deal, and the country is likely to pay a huge price for the execution. The basic point that everyone should know by now is that the TPP had little to do with trade. The United States already had trade deals with six of the 11 other countries in the pact. The trade barriers with...