Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Coronavirus dashboard for March 22 This is a new daily or nearly daily update I hope to post, including the most important metrics to show how controlled – or out of control – the cononavirus pandemic is. Hopefully the numbers will move ever closer to the tipping point where the epidemic is under control.In order to bring this pandemic under control, and prevent both health and economic catastrophes, in my opinion the US needs 2 weeks of China (total...

Patient privacy prevents precise calculation of the fraction of Covid 19 patients in the USA being treated with Hydroxychloroquine or Chloroquine. However, Hospitals are purchasing hugely increased amounts Christopher Rowland reports. Data gathered in the first 17 days of March by Premier Inc., a large group purchasing organization for 4,000 U.S. hospitals, showed a 300 percent week-over-week increase in orders of chloroquine and a 70 percent...

Some Ideas for Pandeminomics The starting point for all of what follows is that government, if it has the will to act, is currently in the driver’s seat.  Much of the private sector is facing a terrifying confluence of crunches: supply breakdowns, demand falling off a cliff for many goods and services, and a looming shortfall of liquidity to service debt.  A wide swath of business is on the ropes and needs a rescue from government.  This puts the power...

The Coronavirus Recession has begun This morning we got two reports that confirm the beginning of the Coronavirus Recession: initial jobless claims and the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index. Initial claims rose to 281,000 one week ago. They are now 15% higher than their low last April, as well as almost 15% higher preliminarily on a monthly basis than last March, and the 4 week moving average is just shy of 5% higher than one year ago.  This meets two...

The Coming Fiscal Crisis Of State And Local Governments Yesterday my wife Marina and I met with our personal attorney, a close friend also, to fix  some loose ends in our wills due to some recent family deaths, as well the current situation.  He also happens to sit on the Harrisonburg City Council, as well as having been Mayor for a  while and a longtime member of the city Planning Commission, someone whose competence we have great respect for.  Anyway,...

In the quaint, pre-coronavirus world of February, the economy was already very weak I have a post up at Seeking Alpha, taking a look at this morning’s retail sales and industrial production reports for February, and briefly considering their implications for employment in the coming months, even before the impact of coronavirus. Here’s a graph that didn’t make it into that post, showing the past 25+ years of real retail sales (red), jobs (blue), and real...

Europe’s Response to Coronavirus and the Implications for the U.S. As I listened to the morning news about the coronavirus crisis, I was reminded of this critique of the Eurozone: In a recent conference, the distinguished economist Paul Krugman repeated the oft-heard critique that the eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Waltraud Schelkle disagrees with this characterisation, and argues that no country or group of countries represents an optimal...

Benefit-Cost Analysis and the Coronavirus We are in the middle of a flurry of decision-making on how to deal with COVID-19.  After much resistance, officials are now canceling public events, closing schools and discouraging other activities that put us in contact with each other.  Travel restrictions and possible shutdowns of workplaces, as we’ve seen in Italy, may be up next. It’s interesting we haven’t heard anything about benefit-cost analysis in...

Coronavirus update: reason for alarm; (small) reason for hope This weekend has continued the discouraging news: reports just about everywhere that the Young Invulnerables packed the bars Friday night; the Petri dishes of airport security lines packed with Americans returning from Europe; and personally, two friends who I have known for almost 40 years getting very sick this past week and not able to be tested for coronavirus (one of whom by the way went...

Trump Administration Continues to Attack the Environmental Projections First Put Into Place by the Nixon Administration If you, the reader, are uncertain whether to support Trump or whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be, I urge you to consider the devastating reduction in protections for clean air, clean water, and clean land (thus also clean air/water and food) under the Trump administration’s ‘hate anything Obama’ approach that has put...