Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Are We Alone In The Galaxy (Or Maybe Even The Universe?) In 1938 Orson Welles put on a radio show in New York City that dramatized the famous novel by H.G. Wells, _The War of the Worlds_. This novel is about an invasion of Planet Earth by intelligent beings from Planet Mars, with this invasion just  barely being defeated.  Several movies have been made of this famous novel, probably the first to present this now long-running sc-fi theme of our planet...

A new risk at the Fed: Donald Trump’s power to fire Fed Governors Calling it “breaking with decades of presidential convention,” the New York Times reported last week on Donald Trump’s open criticism of recent Federal Reserve rate hikes. quoting him as telling donors at a  fund-raiser in the Hamptons: that he had expected Mr. Powell to adhere to an easy-money monetary policy, by keeping interest rates low, when he nominated Mr. Powell in November to...

Pew Charitable Trust confirms the “rental (and ownership) affordability crisis” In case you thought I was talking through my hat about the general lack of affordability of all types of housing, including both owning and renting, the Pew Charitable Trust has also stepped up with a nearly identical analysis.  Go read the whole thing, but here are a few especially noteworthy excerpts: [A]ccording to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies[, d]emand...

Can the Fed successfully steer between Scylla and Charybdis? An update As I type this, the spread between 2 year and 10 year Treasuries is back to 0.25%, the level below which I switch my rating on the yield curve from positive to neutral. Already the spread is tight enough that, even if it never inverts, it suggests a slowdown in the next 6-12 months, as happened in 1984 and 1995 in the graph below of real YoY GDP growth and the Fed funds rate:...

Economic Policy Institute has published a new study on the surge in CEO compensation: Summary What this report finds: This report looks at trends in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, using two different measures. The first measure includes stock options realized (in addition to salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, and long-term incentive payouts). By this measure, in 2017 the average CEO of the 350 largest firms in the U.S. received $18.9...

It’s called the Accountable Capitalism Act.   Here’s the bill text. Yves Smith has a take on this…lots of talk in the news econ sections: Elizabeth Warren introduced her Accountable Capitalism Act in the Senate yesterday and set forth the logic of her bill in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The Massachusetts senator described how as recently as the early 1980s, even conservative groups acknowledged publicly that corporations were responsible to employees and...

Kevin Hassett In Lie Lie Land I feel sorry for Kevin Hassett.  Of course he made a complete fool of himself two decades ago with his book on Dow 36,000 (still some ways away) with James Glassman, but he has had a good amount of time to get over that embarrassment.  When he was appointed CEA Chair for Trump, he was of the few appointments Trump made that received praise, especially in the  area of economics.  Pretty much everybody else appointed was...

Gimme Shelter: the rental affordability crisis has worsened Four years ago HUD warned of “the worst rental affordability crisis ever,” citing statistics that About half of renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent, up from 18 percent a decade ago, according to newly released research by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Twenty-seven  percent of renters are paying more than half of their income on rent. This is a serious...

Four measures of wages all show renewed stagnation This is something I haven’t looked at in awhile. Since 2013, I have documented the stagnation vs. growth in average and median wages, for example here and here. I last did this in 2017. So let’s take an updated look. We have a variety of economic data series to track both average and median wages: The most  commonly known measure is that of average hourly pay for nonsupervisory workers, which is part of...

June 2018 JOLTS report evidence of both excellent jobs market and taboo against raising wages Yesterday’s JOLTS report remained excellent, suffering only in comparison to last month: Hires were just below their all-time high of one month ago Quits were just below their all-time high of one month ago Total separations made a new 17-year high Openings were just below their all-time high of two months ago Layoffs and discharges rose to their average level...