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from Dean Baker You don’t have to look far, it’s literally the first sentence in a Bloomberg piece on dollar policy under incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. “Janet Yellen once touted the benefits of a weaker greenback for exports, but as the incoming Treasury secretary, she faces pressure to return the U.S. to a “strong-dollar” policy — and may cause trembles on Wall Street if she doesn’t.” For folks who don’t know, the vast majority of U.S. stock is held by the richest 10 percent...

Tags: open thread

from Asad Zaman This is a review and a summary of some of the key arguments presented by Mian and Sufi in their recent book “House of Debt.” It highlights the contribution of Mian and Sufi by showing how they have solved the mystery of why there was a huge drop in aggregate demand during the Great Depression of 1929 and also following the recent Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8. The article shows how major economists like Keynes, Friedman, Lucas and others tried and failed to provide an...

Please click here to support this open access journal and the WEA Vol 9, No 2, 2020 Table of contents Consensus and Dissention among Economic Science Academics in Mexico Jorge L. Andere, Jorge Luis Canché-Escamilla, Álvaro Cano-Escalante 1 – 23 Economics’ Wisdom Deficit and How to Reduce It John F. Tomer 24 – 37 The Self According to Others: Explaining Social Preferences with Social Approbation Oswin Krüger Ruiz 38 – 54 What can Economists Learn from Deleuze? Abderrazak...

from Lars Syll The Bank of England is today wholly-owned by the UK government, and no other body is allowed to create UK pounds. It can create digital pounds in the payments system that it runs, thus marking up and down the accounts of banks, the government and other public institutions. It also acts as the bank of the government, facilitating its payments. The Bank of England also determines the bank rate, which is the interest rate it pays to commercial banks that hold money (reserves)...

 by New Deal democrat  Weekly Indicators for December 15 – 19 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Even with deterioration in a few noteworthy items like new jobless claims, the overall tenor of both the forecast and the nowcast remains positive. As usual, clicking over and reading should be educational for you and remunerative for me to the tune of a penny or two in my pocket....

Housing permits and starts for November: yet more evidence of an economy primed for takeoff in 2021 If there was bad news yesterday in the further increase of initial jobless claims, there was also good news in the 10+ year highs in new housing permits. Here’s the graph of permits (blue), single-family permits (red, right scale), and housing starts (green): Not only total permits but also the much less noisy single-family permits made...

Last year, getting started on my book I posted some facts and claims about the 21st economy. The key points (slightly elaborated) (1) Most economic activity in the 20th century, including ‘primary’ industries like agriculture and mining and services such as wholesale and retail trade, was fairly directly related to the production and distribution of manufactured goods (2) This is no longer true: around half of all employment is now related to human services, information services...

from David Ruccio Both the number of initial unemployment claims for unemployment compensation and the number of continued claims for unemployment compensation are once again on the rise, signaling a worsening of the Pandemic Depression. This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 935 thousand American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. While initial unemployment claims remain well below the...

Volume 10, Issue No. 4This WEA commentaries issue is a PDF document, selected articles are listed below… An interview with Professor Harold James on transformative crises and the end of globalization as we know it › How to Breathe 1—Capitalism as Robbery › One paradigm or many? Toward a democracy-oriented economics › Which healthcare system was up against coronavirus in Brazil? › Why do we need pluralism in times of disruption? A practical guide › The political economy of inequality...