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from Norbert Häring The hypocrisy of a working group led by the European Central Bank (ECB) on the preservation of cash, which is dominated by banks who at the same time continue to wage their war on cash, has been exposed by cash industry group ESTA in a report. ESTA sent the report to this working group – after it had recently left it in protest. As a part of its cash strategy, which the ECB Governing Council adopted last September and which it has been hiding in the depths of the ECB’s...

from Peter Radford When a large corporation goes on the hunt for a lower cost base of operations I doubt whether it thinks it will be penalized for what is a rational and frequently made decision.  After all if you can make the same revenue and reduce your costs your profit goes up. Yeah.  Capitalism 101.  If we all go about life in this way, and if we believe Adam Smith, all this pursuit of self-interest will shower society with the glories of social benefits previously unheard of. I...

from Lars Syll The gender pay gap is a fact that, sad to say, to a non-negligible extent is the result of discrimination. And even though many women are not deliberately discriminated against, but rather self-select into lower-wage jobs, this in no way magically explains away the discrimination gap. As decades of socialization research has shown, women may be ‘structural’ victims of impersonal social mechanisms that in different ways aggrieve them. Wage discrimination is unacceptable....

This paper reconstructs the Keynesian income – expenditure (IE) model to include distinctions between government purchases of private sector output, government production, and government job guarantee program (JGP) employment. Analytically, including those distinctions transforms the model from a single sector model into a multi-sector model. It also surfaces the logic behind the automatic stabilizer property […]

 – by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 7 – 11 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Despite the spike in consumer prices in May, long term interest rates like in mortgages declined, largely taking back the increase that occurred earlier this year. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the moment, and bring me a penny or two for my efforts....

from Dean Baker If the waitress works in an upscale restaurant and earns a decent living, there is a good chance that she is paying a higher tax rate than a private equity partner. The reason is that private equity (PE) partners get most of their pay in the form of “carried interest.” This is money that is paid to them as a share of the returns on the money they manage. Since private equity partners are rich and powerful, their carried interest payments are taxed at the capital gains tax...

from Dean Baker There is plenty of evidence at this point that CEO pay bears little relationship to returns to shareholders. Yet, it is an article of faith in policy circles, especially progressive policy circles, that companies are being run to maximize returns to shareholders. This is why I loved this story. According to the NYT, Chad Richison, the CEO of Paycom, had a pay package that was worth $211 million. When it came up for vote of shareholders in a say-on-pay ballot, it was voted...