Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Climate Equity: What Is It? While action against climate change languishes, the rhetoric keeps getting more intense.  For several years now it hasn’t been enough to demand climate policy; we need climate justice.  We will not only eliminate fossil fuels in a decade or three, we will solve the problems of poverty and discrimination, and all in a single political package.  It sounds good, but what does it mean? You might look for an answer in new...

Pledging Zero Carbon Emissions by 2030 or 2050: Does it Matter? We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream legislators.  How significant is this difference?  Does where you stand on climate policy depend on whether your policy has a 2030...

Repeat Message to the Mainstream Media: Stop Serving as Trump’s Propaganda Machine I don’t usually like to repeat myself in these posts, but when it comes to the media getting suckered by Trump and serving as bots in his reelection campaign, I have to get shrill: no more headlines reporting on Trump’s tweets, taunts and tantrums!  Just stop!  Now! The New York Times is one of the worst, and they would do well to read their own reportage on the matter. ...

Mankiw Misrepresents a Story on Senator Sanders Campaign Worker Negotiations Greg Mankiw reads this story and writes: Staffers in the Sanders campaign, who are working on salary, complain that they are paid less than the $15 per hour that Senator Sanders advocates for the minimum wage. So Sanders raises their hourly wage. Does that increase their income? No, because he raised the hourly wage by cutting the number of hours they work! Of course, if a...

Mark Thoma has a post up on Facebook. Apparently, Trump intends to nominate Dr. Judy Shelton to the Fed. I knew Trump was bat-sh*t crazy and now he has confirmed he is bat-sh*t stupid too (if you did not already know this). It is hard to know which is worse as they come in a daily stream of excesses. I do not necessarily agree with my former Econ Prof (not Mark) from time to time; but, he does have a deeper knowledge on the topic than I, to which I listen...

WARNING: another “debt ceiling debacle” is looming, and could cause nearly immediate recession It’s time to start to get seriously worried about another “debt ceiling debacle.” In 2011, the GOP refused to authorize a “clean” debt ceiling hike. The hike in the debt ceiling, for those who may not know, is necessary for the US government to pay debts that *it has already incurred.* In 2011, as a result of the impasse, US creditworthiness was downgraded...

Friday evening the S&P 500 closed at 3013.77, up 20.2 % year to date. But much of that gain is just recovering from the drop in late 2019, as  it is only up some 3.4% from September, 2019. This is the first time the S&P closed above 3000 and people are wondering if the market is overvalued. The S&P 500 PE is now at 19.6, almost exactly where my model implies it should be.  As the chart shows it is right in the middle of my estimated fair value...

The Rise of Global Innovation by US Multinationals 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...

Scenes from the June employment report As I (and everyone else) wrote on Friday, the establishment portion of the June jobs report was very good. On closer examination, though, the leading components of the report continued to show some weakness. To begin with, for months I’ve been following manufacturing, residential construction, and temporary employment as the leading sectors. As the below graph of the past 18 months shows, all were positive in...

Everybody and their brother has an opinion about the direction of long bond yields so  it should be OK for me to stick my two cents worth in. This chart of the composite of all long bond yields versus the long wave is one I published every month on the back cover of my monthly publication for over 20 years before I retired a couple of years ago.  Basically, I thought of it as a good way  to show that I was a long term bull on interest rates in a way that...