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from Richard Parker and current issue of RWER Let me now try to connect this little synoptic “longue duree” to the present and to the matter before us: neoliberalism and what might succeed it. We live in the early 21st century and the conventional economics we’ve inherited has now arrived at a moment when once-novel Victorian-era ideas seem not just inadequate but irrelevant. A similar moment seemed, to many, to have arrived before, back in the 1930s. But apostles of marginalism such as...

In our last post we saw that private sector indices for used car prices and for rent prices were highly predictive of future changes in the corresponding CPI component indices. The next logical step is obvious: we should use this information to build an aggregate CPI index that factors in this forward-looking information to get a prediction of inflation over the next six months. In all honesty, I was a little reticent to do this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is a...

With a federal election taking place in Canada in fewer than three weeks, I’ve written a 950-word overview of the Liberal Party’s housing platform. It’s available here: https://nickfalvo.ca/ten-things-to-know-about-the-liberal-partys-housing-platform/ Nick Falvo is a Calgary-based research consultant with a PhD in Public Policy. He has academic affiliation at both Carleton University and Case Western Reserve University, and is Section Editor of the Canadian Review of...

from Lars Syll Submission to observed or experimental data is the golden rule which dominates any scientific discipline. Any theory whatever, if it is not verified by empirical evidence, has no scientific value and should be rejected. Maurice Allais Formalistic deductive ‘Glasperlenspiel’ can be very impressive and seductive. But in the realm of science it ought to be considered of little or no value to simply make claims about models and lose sight of reality. Mainstream economics has...

This paper explores the economics and political economy of financialization using Matt Taibbi’s vampire squid metaphor to characterize it. The paper makes five innovations. First, it focuses on the mechanics of the “vampire squid” process whereby financialization rotates through the economy loading sector balance sheets with debt. Second, it identifies the critical role of government […]

from Norbert Häring Thales, one of the largest international defense contractors, calls the digital vaccination passport a precursor to universal mobile-digital identity credentials. Thales thus confirms my analysis and my worst fears. Under the headline “How digital ID can help citizens access government services from anywhere,” Kristel Teyras, in charge of the defense contractor Thales’ Digital Identity Services portfolio, writes: “So-called digital ‘vaccination passports’ will play a...

from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler Here we show the after-tax profit and market capitalization of the top 0.01% of U.S.-based corporations, expressed as a % of U.S. GDP. Updated from ‘The Asymtptoes of Power‘.

Back in early August, my old colleague James Montier and I released a White Paper on inflation. In it we argued that our baseline scenario was that we would see transitory inflation caused by the extreme supply shocks caused by the lockdowns. We drew an analogy to the end of rationing in Britain after WWII, where we saw temporary price increases in the markets for rationed goods. Further, we argued that any sustained inflation would require a wage-price spiral. That is, in order...

from Lars Syll The Coin-tossing Problem My friend Ben says that on the first day he got the following sequence of Heads and Tails when tossing a coin: H H H H H H H H H H And on the second day he says that he got the following sequence: H T T H H T T H T H Which report makes you suspicious? Most people yours truly asks this question says the first report looks suspicious. But actually both reports are equally probable! Every time you toss a (fair) coin there is the same probability (50 %)...