Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Dean Baker It is striking how the media universally accept the idea that patent and copyright monopolies are somehow free trade. We get that the people who own and control major news outlets like these forms of protection, but it is incredibly dishonest to claim that they are somehow free trade. We get this story yet again in a NYT piece complaining about China’s “theft” of intellectual property, while telling readers about how Trump’s proposed tariffs show his: “resolve to turn away...

My Masters is from Loyola University Chicago. Stopped by for a visit with my Econ Prof as well as the school Dean and to see their new buildings. Smaller school and no more than 16,000 total. [embedded content] Go Loyola University . . . Last time in the Sweet 16 1985. Last time winning NCAA 1963.

 I pour some cold water on 2018 midterm overoptimism In the wake of Conor Lamb’s election victory in Pennsylvania last Tuesday night, some Democratic partisans are suggesting that every GOP-held seat from a district that is less than trump +20% is in play. Hold your horses. The results of last June’s special election in Georgia, in which GOPer Karen Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff show that there is a roadmap to the GOP minimizing their losses in...

from Asad Zaman Because of the universal spread and impact of Western educational systems, necessary for survival in the modern world, we have all learned to view the world through glasses manufactured in Europe. Just as a fish is unaware of the waters in which it swims, so we are unaware of the currents of history which have shaped European thought. Yet to understand the world we live in, and how our perceptions have been shaped by the dominance of West, it is essential to acquire an...

from Lars Syll Yours truly was interviewed last week for a radio program re the legacy and impact of Margaret Thatcher on society. The picture below conveys, in not so many words, my feelings and views on the subject … The rising inequality that has been going on in our societies since the Reagan-Thatcher era is outrageous. Income and wealth have​ increasingly been concentrated in the hands of a very small and privileged elite. And a society where we allow the inequality of incomes and...

from David Ruccio I have been arguing, since 2016 (e.g., here, here, and here), that one of the likely outcomes of the kind of corporate tax cuts Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have supported—and, as we saw, eventually rammed through—would be an increase in inequality. That’s because corporations would likely use a portion of their higher profits to engage in stock buybacks, leading to an increase in stock prices. And stock ownership in the United States is already grotesquely...

from Dean Baker Eswar Prasad makes the case in an NYT column that we should be paying attention to the selection of Yi Gang to head China’s central bank as a result of China’s status as the world’s second-largest economy. Prasad is right about the importance of China’s central bank in the world economy, but it is worth noting that by purchasing power parity (PPP) measures China is already by far the world’s largest economy. Purchasing power parity calculations of GDP attempt to measure...

Lifted from comments by PGL: The dollar has devalued since Trump became President: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TWEXB Barry Eichengreen has some interesting thoughts here: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/what-explains-dollar-weakness-by-barry-eichengreen-2018-03 “One of the big ones in the circles I frequent is dollar weakness. Between January 2017 and January 2018, the broad effective exchange rate of the dollar fell by 8%,...