Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

The Soybean Boom Via TalkingPointsMemo AP notes: Private forecasters cautioned that the April-June pace is unsustainable because, they say, it stems from temporary factors, including a rush by exporters of soybeans and other products to get their shipments out before retaliatory tariffs took effect. They predicted the rest of the year is likely to see solid, but slower growth of around 3 percent. The transformation is also not as dramatic as Trump...

Economic Policy Institute answers two laymen questions on wage stagnation: Why is wage growth so slow? It’s not because low-wage jobs are being added disproportionately: One explanation worth looking into is whether today’s low wage growth is due to a composition effect—i.e. low-wage jobs being added faster than middle- and/or high-wage jobs and, as a result, pulling down wage growth…But since 2013, as the recovery has strengthened, the opposite has been...

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...

by Joseph Joyce Can Globalization Be Reversed? The wide-scale imposition of tariffs by the Trump administration is part of a larger effort to undo the expansion of markets around the globe and ensure that the goods consumed in the U.S. will be produced here. Will it be successful? And what would a world that represented a retreat from the globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s look like? Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times believes that the open...

Lawfare blog published a solid read of the latest indictment announced by Rod Rosenstein. The indictment Friday morning of 12 Russian military intelligence officials in connection with the 2016 election hacks and the resulting distribution of purloined emails was not a total surprise. Observers of the Mueller investigation have been expecting it for a long time, particularly since the Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three companies over...

Real average and aggregate wages: July 2018 update As we close out this week devoted to jobs and wages, with the consumer price index having been reported yesterday, let’s take a look at real wages. By now you’ve probably read elsewhere that YoY wages for average workers actually declined slightly (-0.1%): But the flatness goes back further: all the way to February 2016: Real wages have only grown 0.4% in the last 2 years and 4 months. So...

A business cycle theory of labor force participation and wage growth I’ve devoted a lot of time and thought, and typed a lot of pixels of commentary, about wage growth in the last few years. Some of it has panned out: based on past expansions,I expected YoY wage growth to bottom consistent with an unemployment rate of about 6%. A little later I refined that to an underemployment rate of 9%. In retrospect that is indeed about when wage growth bottomed out...

I was going to put up a short piece about wages this morning, but it has turned into a longer, more comprehensive piece, so in the meantime, here are some teasers to ponder. 1. There is a direct relationship between the economy generally, and child care costs specifically, and couples’ decisions about whether or not to have more children: The below graph comes from Vox.com. It is the top eight reasons that couples give for not having (more)...

Don’t say I didn’t warn you (in particular, don’t say I didn’t warn you on September 25 2008). Naked CDS make financial arson profitable. It is also, probably, legal. It seems Blackstone made some money by threatening financial arson (arson meets grenmail). WSJ (via Drum) Blackstone offered Hovnanian a low-cost loan and persuaded the builder to miss a small interest payment in exchange, which would trigger payouts on $333 million in Blackstone’s...

The Fed just let Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs off the hook after both failed the required stress tests under Dodd-Frank. The stress test is supposed to predict whether banks and so-called banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs can weather a financial crisis. This is not an instance of if you remember in 2008, who could forget? Few TBTF had set aside the necessary reserves to back the tranched MBS and the more risky CDS/naked CDS. These were the...