Tag Archives: Uncategorized

I don’t see any convincing evidence of a housing market revival, particularly with the growth of real estate lending remaining well below that of last year: Highlights Purchase applications for home mortgages rose a seasonally adjusted 5 percent in the November 17 week, though overall mortgage activity was only barely higher (by 0.1 percent) than in the prior week as the increase in buyers was offset by a 5 percent decline in refinancing activity. On an unadjusted basis, the...

This article looks at the future of colleges and universities: There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, but Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says that half are bound for bankruptcy in the next few decades. Christensen is known for coining the theory of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Since then, he has applied his theory of disruption to a wide range of industries,...

from Asad Zaman The bull charges the red flag being waved by the matador, and is killed because he makes a mistake in recognizing the enemy.  A standard strategy of the ultra-rich throughout the ages has been to convince the masses that their real enemy lies elsewhere. Most recently, Samuel Huntington created a red flag when he painted the civilization of Islam as the new enemy, as no nation was formidable enough to be useful as an imaginary foe to scare the public with. Trillions of...

from Lars Syll In a recent attempt to defend DSGE modelling, Lawrence Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum and Mathias Trabandt have to admit that DSGE models have failed to predict financial crises. The reason they put forward for this is that the models did not “integrate the shadow banking system into their analysis.” That certainly is true — but the DSGE problems go much deeper than that:  A typical modern approach to writing a paper in DSGE macroeconomics is as follows: o to establish...

Up a touch more than expected, but still down year over year: Up a bit for the month but the chart shows the weakness vs prior cycles: No improvement yet:

from C.P. Chandasekhar News that the US economy grew at 3 per cent during the hurricane-blighted third quarter of 2017, close to the 3.1 per cent recorded in the previous quarter, has once more revived claims that the world economy has left the Great Recession behind. There is one reason to discount this claim. Back to back 3 per cent annualized rates of growth in consecutive quarters has been observed more than once since the 2008 crisis. In fact, as recently as the second and third...

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from David Ruccio Wealth inequality in the United States has reached such extreme levels it is almost impossible to put it into perspective. But the folks at the Institute for Policy Studies (pdf) have found a novel way, by comparing the fortunes of the 400 wealthiest Americans to the meager assets of everyone else. Here’s what they found:   The three wealthiest people in the United States—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the...

Here’s is a PBS commentary by law professor Ekow Yankah: That Kroger, the Midwestern grocery chain, has decided to make the heroin overdose drug naloxone available without a prescription is a sign of how ominous the current epidemic has grown. Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak...