Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Peter Radford Whenever we are told about a Trump plan we have to use the word “plan” very carefully. Thus far Trump’s various plans have been more vague suggestions, hints, clues to what’s inside his head, or varieties of “what a plan were to look like were Trump to have an actual plan, but he doesn’t”. This week’s ballyhooed tax plan is no exception. It has been introduced as a framework. A skeleton. A coat hanger upon which Congress will need to hang actual policy in order to...

from Lars Syll We recommend dropping the NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] paradigm — and the p-value thresholds associated with it — as the default statistical paradigm for research, publication, and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences. Specifically, rather than allowing statistical signicance as determined by p < 0.05 (or some other statistical threshold) to serve as a lexicographic decision rule in scientic publication and statistical decision making more...

from Jacques Sapir Dear all,  Hypothese.org and Open Edition have suspended the access to my blog RussEurope. I can’t write anymore on my blog. In a short letter posted to my blog the Open Edition director, Mr Marin Dacos, explains that this measure is a reaction to the fact my last post are no more “academic”. Actually, I posted various kind of paper, from long technical papers to short pieces since the very beginning of my blog. Hence a post dating from September 22nd 2012 giving a good...

July Personal income revised down to .3 and August only .2 further confirms income growth- the driver of consumption- has slowed down in line with the deceleration in bank lending, and the same seems to be the case with spending, with weak price indicators further confirming the same weak demand narrative. And the very low savings rate tells me there’s a lot more weakness to come: Highlights The next Federal Reserve rate hike may not be in December after all, based on an...

Revised higher due to inventory building- not good- and weak prices also tend to indicate low demand. And note how q3 gdp estimates have been coming down as well: HighlightsSecond-quarter GDP proved strong, at an as-expected 3.1 percent annualized rate for the third estimate driven by consumer spending at a 3.3 percent rate. Nonresidential fixed investment, at a 6.7 percent rate, was also a strong contributor and offsetting a 7.3 percent decline for residential investment....

Heading south in line with the deceleration of mortgage lending: Highlights Weakness in the South pulled down new home sales in August as it did in last week’s existing home sales report. New home sales fell sharply in the month to a 560,000 annualized rate vs an upward revised rate of 580,000 in July and a downward revised 614,000 in June (revisions total a net minus 7,000). Sales in the South, which is by far the largest region for housing, fell 4.7 percent in the month...

A whole score of Caribbean Islands seem to have been wiped out by a whole series of unusually strong hurricanes. These islands (Dominica, Puerto Rico, St-Maarten, Anguilla, …) need loads of outside help. But these societies have to  be resilient, too. Which means that they need money suited to this task: cash. See below. There is however a powerful lobby which tries to get rid of cash (i.e. government money) and to replace this with electronic bank moneys. Sad. Aside – once government...

As a follow up to my post on homicides in 2016, I decided to combine homicide data from the FBI with figures from the police shooting database from the Washington Post. The only difficulty is that the FBI classifies people as being from Black, White, Other, or Unknown races, whereas the Washington Post breaks out other groups, such as Hispanic. Because Hispanic people can be Black, White, or Other (as per FBI classfication), it is necessary to assign...

from David Ruccio Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations makes for uncomfortable reading these days. That’s because, as my students this semester have learned, the father of modern mainstream economics—who has become so closely (and mistakenly) identified with the invisible hand—held a narrow theory of money and advocated extensive regulation of the banking sector. This is contrast to the obscene growth of banking in recent decades, which Rana Foroohar reminds “isn’t serving us, we’re serving...