Tag Archives: business cycle

One of the problems with many theoretical approaches to the business cycle is that there is an implicit bias towards a manufacturing economy. The modelling of business sector decision making for manufacturing is quite different than for the service sector. This matters, as the developed economies are increasingly services-driven (figure above). For consumer-facing service industries, output is largely demand-driven. This fits much better with the post-Keynesian approach. This article is...

One often encounters assertions that recessions are the result of an excess demand for money (or some variant), based on various equilibrium arguments. Although one could superficially interpret recessions in such a fashion, the issue is that this interpretation does not help analyse the business cycle. In other words, it is a non-falsifiable statement that offers no useful information. In my view, discussions involving "money" or "safe assets" provide us an example regarding the limited...

Ed Harrison on Ray Dalio on bonds.Credit Writedowns Ray Dalio: We are already in a bond bear market right nowEdward Harrison

Forecast.Credit Writedowns As the Fed meets, expect expansion through 2018, but problems thereafterEdward Harrison

Review and critique of the latest OECD World Economic Outlook, from a Marxian POV. Useful. The key for me, as readers of this blog know, is what is happening to the profitability of capital in the major economies. If profitability is rising, then corporate investment and economic growth will follow – but also vice versa. But if profitability and profits are falling, debt accumulated will become a major burden. Eventually the zombies will start to go bankrupt, spreading across sectors and...

The big picture then is this: a global economy into its ninth year of the business cycle that is starting to gain momentum with the US flirting with 3% growth and 4% unemployment with richly priced asset markets but a flattening yield curve. We’ve seen this picture before.… In retrospect, one could argue that the Fed’s late interest rate hike campaign was a policy error – that the Fed should have seen the flattening yield curve as a canary in the coal mine and resisted raising its policy...