Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

A hypothesis for Prof. Krugman: the transmission method was FEAR In his recent column disagreeing with Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman asks for an explanation as to how a financial panic could lead to years thereafter of a slow recovery. Specifically, Krugman says that he “really really wants to hear about the transmission mechanism.” After all, the financial panic eased in 2009. And yet, outside of the very noteworthy exceptions of corporate profits...

A detailed look at Industrial Production during this expansion In the past week there’s been a little highbrow relitigation of the drivers of the “Great Recession” between Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke. Bernanke plumps for it having been a “credit event” — and as to the crisis of 2008, he is clearly correct — while Krugman says it was primarily a “housing event,” although Krugman also acknowledges that he is mainly speaking of the aftermath from 2009...

The Minsky Moment Ten Years After These days are the tenth anniversary of the biggest Minsky Moment since the Great Depression.  While when it happened most commentators mentioned Minsky and many even called it a “Minsky Moment,” most of the commentary now does not use that term and much does not even mention Minsky, much less Charles Kindleberger or Keynes.  Rather much of the discussion has focused now on the failure of Lehman Brothers on September...

Trump Wants to Lower Drug Prices I just now got around to reading some May 11 speech by Donald Trump who says he wants to reign in the high price of drugs. A laudable goal and Trump said some things that got applause. But ahem – he may no clue especially when he says things like this: We’re very much eliminating the middlemen. The middlemen became very, very rich. Right? (Applause.) Whoever those middlemen were — and a lot of people never even figured...

Go, Secretary Mnuchin! Save The Iranian Banks! In the Sept. 14 Washington Post, Josh Rogin is all shocked and upset about a report that people in the US Treasury Department, apparently supported by, if not outright led by, Secretary Steve Mnuchin, have been stonewalling or slow-moving a memo that was ordered up by President Trump in late July in order to implement the fully renewed financial sanctions against Iran, specifically to disallow Iranian banks...

The Taboo against raising wages is still thriving among small businesses The National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) put out its monthly confidence and hiring reports over the past few days. The confidence report soared to new high, so the economy is Teh Awesome and happy days are here again! Right? And look! It’s confirmed by the hiring report, which also shows record high plans to hire new workers: So how have those record hiring...

Subdued inflation helps gains in real average and aggregate wages With the consumer price report Tuesday morning, let’s conclude this weeklong focus on jobs and wages by updating real average and aggregate wages. Through July 2018, consumer prices are up 2.7% YoY, while wages for non-managerial workers are up 2.8%. Thus real wages have finally grown, ever so slightly, YoY: In the longer view, real wages have still been flat — up only 0.5% — for...

Kevin Hassett Needs Remedial Arithmetic Kevin DOW 36000 Hassett was sent out to the White House press to lie about real wage growth. Or maybe he just proved he seriously needs remedial math for another reason besides one that Brad DeLong notes: Glassman and Hassett get the math of the Gordon equation for valuing the stock market simply wrong. It’s not the earnings yield that shows up in the numerator, it’s the dividend yield. The book should have been...

New article on tax increment financing in Missouri shows impact of KS/MO border war After several years of work, my colleague Susan G. Mason (Boise State University) and I have published a new article on TIF in Missouri, specifically in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas. “Exploring Patterns of Tax Increment Financing Use and Structural Explanations in Missouri’s Major Metropolitan Regions” appeared in the July 2018 edition of the HUD...

Next Friday could be a very bad day somewhere along the East Coast I think I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a nerd, right? So, last year during hurricane season I got hooked on a site called Tropical Tidbits. The neat thing about this site — well, from a nerdy point of view — is that it posts the GFS model forecast, updated every 6 six hours, for the next two weeks! While you normally don’t hear forecasts more than five days out, I noticed...