Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Has Trump Won This Easy Trade War With Our Greatest Foe, The European Union? 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...

Trump Tariffs Hit Largest US Aluminum Company, ALCOA 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...

The Value of Life and the Metaphor of Choice 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...

In Defense of the Francois-Baughman Analysis of the Trump Tariffs 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...

June jobs report: another strong late cycle reading HEADLINES: +213,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate up +0.2% from 3.8% to 4.0% U6 underemployment rate up +0.2% from 7.6% to 7.8% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  up +75,000 from 5.183 million to 5.258 million Part time for economic reasons: down -205,000 from 4.948 million to 4.743...

Does Greg Mankiw Know the History of U.S. Trade Policy? Greg offers us a nice speech by Saint Reagan. While Ronald Reagan preached free trade, Jeffrey Frankel notes that his actual record was rather protectionist. The discussion is an excellent account of how Republicans have been protectionist since 1854. But the really weird thing in Reagan’s discussion was how he claimed the U.S. has been a free trade nation since 1776. Of course Congress passed...

by Joseph Joyce The Spillover Effects of Rising U.S. Interest Rates U.S. interest rates have been rising, and most likely will continue to do so. The target level of the Federal Funds rate, currently at 1.75%, is expected to be raised at the June meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds rose above 3%, then fell as fears of Italy breaking out the Eurozone flared. That decline is likely to be reversed while the...

Wage growth: is the dam finally breaking? [Apologies for the light posting: I’ve been traveling, and there isn’t a lot of news this week.] A couple of months ago I wrote that raising wages may have become a “taboo,” i.e., that in some cases employers may be refusing to raising wages, even though it may be costing his money. One of the items I relied upon was from the NFIB, as small business owners presumably are not “monopsonies.” As of February, the...

May jobs report: excellent news on unemployment, underemployment, and wages HEADLINES: +223,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate fell -0.1% from 3.9% to 3.8% U6 underemployment rate fell -0.2% from 7.8% to 7.6% Here are the headlines on wages and the braoder measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  up 68,000 from 5.115 million to 5.183 million Part time for economic reasons: down -37,000 from...

Regulation: A Gut Check How do we get the word out that our underlying conception of how regulations should be designed and enforced needs to change? The New York Times has an ominous article about the overuse of antibiotics by the livestock industry and its risks for animal health and ours.  Flooding our digestive system with these drugs damages the gut microbiome we depend on for nutrition and waste processing, and it promotes the evolution of...