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from David Ruccio Thanks to the release of the so-called Paradise Papers, and the additional research conducted by Gabriel Zucman, Thomas Tørsløv, and Ludvig Wier, we know that a large share of the surplus captured by corporations is artificially shifted to tax havens all over the world. This, of course, is on top of the conspicuous tax evasion practiced by the individual holders of a large portion of the world’s wealth.   Thus, for example, U.S. multinational corporations now claim to...

October Retail Hiring Lowest In Six Years from Challenger Gray and Christmas Fewer major retailers have announced large-scale hiring announcements so far this year, which reflects the drop in the number of October employment gains in the sector. Gains fell 8 percent from last year to 136,700, the lowest October gain since 2011, when the sector added 134,200 jobs. Imports up and exports down doesn’t help US GDP: Port of Long Beach: Another Record Month in October By Bill...

from Lars Syll Our admiration for technical virtuosity should never blind us to the fact that we have to have a cautious attitude towards probabilistic inferences in economic contexts. Science should help us disclose causal forces behind apparent ‘facts.’ We should look out for causal relations, but econometrics can never be more than a starting point in that endeavour since econometric (statistical) explanations are not explanations in terms of mechanisms, powers, capacities or causes....

from Edward Fullbrook In public, including in the training of economists, Neoclassical economics usually reads its models backwards. This gives the illusion that they show the behaviour of individual economic units determining sets of equilibrium values for markets and for whole economies. It hides the fact that these models have been constructed not by investigating the behaviour of individual agents, but rather by analysing the requirements of achieving a certain macro state, that is, a...

Did the growth of money caused by QE in the Eurozone (graph) stimulate economic activity? Not enough. According to John Maynard Keynes, in ‘The general theory’ (1936), “The relation of changes in M (money) to Y (income) and r (the interest rate) depends, in the first instance, on the way in which changes in M come about.” Put differently: credit and not money makes the world go round. Money creating lending to enable household purchases of existing homes has a quite different effect on...

from David Ruccio The release of the so-called Paradise Papers confirms, with additional names and more salacious details, what we already knew from the Panama Papers and other sources: the world’s wealthy increasingly use offshore tax havens to engage in conspicuous tax evasion. That’s on top of their participation in conspicuous consumption, conspicuous philanthropy, and conspicuous productivity. According to Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman, in a study...

from Lars Syll Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions. John Cochrane And the tiny little problem? It’s utterly and completely...

Still no sign of a rebound: Home prices rising about 6% annually and loans now growing at under 4% annually looks in line with at best flat housing sales: Looks like the blip up as hurricane destroyed vehicles were replaced has run its course: This had looked like it peaked a couple of years ago, but since went back up to new highs:

The Guardian newspaper has a story about wages in England: A shortage of factory workers is starting to push up pay rates but wage rises in the services sector remain rooted at around 2%, according to the latest feedback from the Bank of England’s regional agents. The central bank said its agents, which are based in offices across the country, found that shortages this month across the manufacturing sector were leading to a “slight increase in pay growth”...