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The announcement that the Indian state of Gujarat will allow no new thermal coal plants seems like a really big deal. First up, it’s striking that a state with electricity demand growing at 8-10 per cent a year has concluded that it can meet this demand entirely with renewables. That’s totally contrary to the line pushed by the government and coal lobby here in Australia, suggesting that rapid growth in electricity demand can only be met by coal. Second, Gujarat is the home...

from David Ruccio

by New Deal democrat An update on forecasts I have a new post up at Seeking Alpha, describing the order in which data has tended to deteriorate before consumer-led recessions. A few conditions have been met; most others have not. I have previously written that if a recession is in the works over the next few quarters, it is more likely to be a producer-led recession, a la 2001. In that regard, a few weeks ago I said that Q2 corporate profits would be a...

from Dean Baker The richest 1% have done extraordinarily well over the last four decades. But income has stagnated for the majority. This was not an accident. It was by design. My book, Rigged, highlights five areas where US policies were deliberately structured to redistribute income upwards. IP laws were strengthened, making patent & copyright monopolies longer and stronger This hugely increased the share of GDP that goes to sectors like pharmaceuticals, medical equipment,...

from Lars Syll When I present this argument … one or more scholars say, “But shouldn’t I control for everything I can in my regressions? If not, aren’t my coefficients biased due to excluded variables?” This argument is not as persuasive as it may seem initially. First of all, if what you are doing is misspecified already, then adding or excluding other variables has no tendency to make things consistently better or worse … The excluded variable argument only works if you are sure your...

I have been looking at the data recently to find economic series that would quickly reflect the impact of rising tariffs on the consumer. One is Retail Sales: GAFO.  Think of it as department store type merchandise  — goods excluding autos, food and energy. It is reported every month in both the Census retail sales press release and in the BEA measures of retail sales they compile in putting together personal spending and GDP.  I have long preferred the...

July JOLTS report: m/m improvement, but slowing trend Yesterday*s  morning’s JOLTS report for July was in general surprisingly positive on a monthly basis, but continued to show a slowing trend. To review, because this series is only 20 years old, we only have one full business cycle to compare. During the 2000s expansion: Hires peaked first, from December 2004 through September 2005 Quits peaked next, in September 2005 Layoffs and Discharges peaked...

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from Dean Baker In the United States, proposals for a Green New Deal have been getting considerable attention in recent months as activists have pressed both members of Congress and Democratic presidential candidates to support aggressive measures to combat global warming. There clearly is much more that we can and must do in the immediate future to prevent enormous damage to the planet. However, major initiatives in the United States to combat global warming will almost certainly require...