Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll If economics was an honest profession, economists would focus their efforts on documenting the waste associated with protectionist barriers for professionals. They devoted endless research studies to estimating the cost to consumers of tariffs on products like shoes and tires. It speaks to the incredible corruption of the economics profession that there are not hundreds of studies showing the loss to consumers from the barriers to trade in physicians’ services. If trade...

More of same: More evidence this has stabilized and maybe reversed: Expectations up, current conditions down: Highlights Consumer sentiment unexpectedly burst higher in the August flash but the results, warns the report, do not fully reflect the impact of the weekend’s violence in Virginia. The index rose to 97.6 which is well over Econoday’s high estimate and the strongest reading since the post-election surge in January. But the report said “too few” interviews were...

First they coddled the white supremacists with false equivalency, and I didn’t resign from the Trump Evangelical Council because those protesting the white supremacists didn’t have a permit…

from David Ruccio The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought — Rudi Dornbusch Last week, a wide variety of U.S. media (including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today) marked what they considered to be the ten-year anniversary of the beginning of the global economic crisis—from which we still haven’t recovered.  The event in question, which occurred on 9 August 2007, was the announcement by international banking...

Who knew that neo-Nazi, KKK white supremacists and Trump supporters were liars, cry-babies AND hypocrites? The reasons for secession by the states of the Confederacy were not complex or ambiguous. They are not a mystery. They were proudly proclaimed by the Confederate states. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery and the conviction of the racial superiority of the White man and the social, moral and political inferiority of Africans. This was...

The Confederacy stood for the forcible subjugation of other people. If there is a benefit to honoring the concept of or symbols for the Confederacy I don’t see it. Taking these symbols out of the public sphere is a net positive, even if some people are able to simultaneously a) disassociate those symbols from the oppression they represent and b) venerate those symbols. To be consistent, note that the radical Islamic ideology also calls for the...

Worse than expected, but modest growth from depressed levels. Highlights The Federal Reserve inadvertently released what is a weak July industrial production report about a 1/2 hour early this morning. Headline production rose 0.2 percent vs expectations for 0.3 percent with manufacturing output showing outright contraction, at minus 0.1 percent vs Econoday’s consensus for a 0.2 percent gain. Capacity utilization hit expectations at 76.7 percent. A 3rd straight decline in...

from Dean Baker Last week, I heard BBC announce the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis. This is dated to the decision by the French bank BNP Paribas to prohibit withdrawals from two hedge funds that were heavily invested in subprime mortgage backed securities. According to BBC, this was when lending began to freeze and house prices began to fall. The problem with BBC’s story is that house prices had already been falling for more than a year. While the nationwide...

Lower than expected, and, as always starts are ultimately determined by permits, which have been slowing as per the chart, which also reflects the deceleration in mortgage lending over the last 6 months: Highlights Housing starts couldn’t hold the 1.200 million annualized line in July, falling to a lower-than-expected 1.155 million. The rate is now back to the weakness of March and April in what may be emerging as a declining trend this year. Permits also fell but are...