Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

The *rate* of new jobless claims, at all-time lows, forecasts even lower unemployment I thought I’d start out with something I haven’t looked at in awhile: initial jobless claims as a share of the population and as a leading indicator for the unemployment rate. This economic expansion has featured two contrary extremes in the labor market: low wage growth and increasingly vanishing layoffs (I don’t think that’s a coincidence, but that’s a subject for...

The US-Mexico Trade Deal Dies Nobody is calling it that, but the low key story on the back pages of Wednessday’s major papers report that this is what has happened, not to my surprise.  September 29 (or maybe the 30th at a stretch) is the deadline for President Trump to submit to the Congress the final version of the US-Mexico trade deal if there is any chance of it being passed by the US Senate in time for outgoing Mexican President Pena Nieto to sign...

A Weak Defense of Citizen United: Ownership v. Control Many thanks to Peter Dorman for highlighting Citizens United As Bad Corporate Law. I guess we had to endure this comment, which is a really weak rebuttal: Corporate shareholders are most definitely owners; they alone have the authority to sell their shares or the company’s assets. Their rights are based not on contract law but statutory rules of franchise. They are guaranteed rights of assembly abd...

Citizens United, Thoroughly Debunked I admit I haven’t paid too much attention to debates over Citizens United, since I regard the direction taken by regulation, control over who may contribute to political campaigns and how much they can put up, to be misguided.  I would like to see comprehensive control over how much money can be spent on behalf of candidates, period.  (I would also like to see a mandate that all such contributions be funneled through...

A bold forecast: there will be no autumn surge in housing this year The big issue this year in housing is whether increased mortgage rates and higher prices have merely resulted in a deceleration in the increase in new housing sales and construction, or whether housing is actually rolling over. As I’ve written several times in the last month, there is accumulating evidence that it is actually the latter: housing has at very least plateaued. The acid...

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...