Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Gone flat post covid, adjusted for inflation: The post covid slump continues, and now there are war disruptions: US Consumer Sentiment Lowest since 2011The University of Michigan consumer sentiment for the US fell to 59.7 in March of 2022 from 62.8 in February, below market forecasts of 61.4, preliminary estimates showed. It is the lowest reading since November of 2011, as inflation expectations rose sharply due to a surge in fuel prices exacerbated by the Russian invasion...

from Dean Baker With bad news on oil prices, and a new wave of COVID-19 shutdowns in China, the inflation hawks are getting really excited. After all, higher oil prices and further supply disruptions are sure to add to the inflation the economy is already seeing. I guess they were right with their warnings. Okay, let’s get back to Planet Earth. The large stimulus package that President Biden pushed through last year undoubtedly added to inflation in the economy, but it also quickly got...

Here’s my semi-regular newsletter, and a followup with links to a couple of recent articles about climate change and the disastrous floods in eastern Australia. I’ve been using Mailchimp to send out the newsletter, but it’s mostly oriented to marketers. So, I’ve decided to move to Substack, which quite a few commentators have already done. One option is to move the blog there. That would be a big shift for me, as I’ve had the current site for most of the nearly 20 years I’ve been...

from Lars Syll In the postwar period, it has become increasingly clear that economic growth has not only brought greater prosperity. The other side of growth, in the form of pollution, contamination, wastage of resources, and climate change, has emerged as perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. Against the mainstream theory’s view on the economy as a balanced and harmonious system, where growth and the environment go hand in hand, ecological economists object that it can rather be...

from James McMahon and Blair Fix The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not.— Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler A key aspect of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’ is that it treats property not as a productive asset, but as a negative social relation. Property, Nitzan and Bichler argue, is an institutional act of exclusion. It is the legal right to sabotage. If this idea...

from Lars Syll If the German government were to stop Russian energy imports, the German economy would be able to adapt to the new situation. This is shown in a recent study by the research team led by economists Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick and Prof. Dr. Moritz Kuhn … The researchers analyzed the potential economic impact of a cut-off from Russian energy imports. The result: The consequences would be substantial, but manageable. Germany would not run out of energy … According to the...