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Still soft, also somewhat in line with decelerating bank mortgage lending: Highlights Purchase applications for home mortgages fell a seasonally adjusted 3 percent in the July 7 week, while applications for refinancing fell 13 percent from the previous week to the lowest level since January 2017. The refinance share of mortgage activity fell 2.8 percentage points to 42.1 percent. The decline in applications was registered despite adjustments for the Fourth of July holiday. On...

House price developments in the EU show large differences in development – which makes the task for monetary and fiscal policy even more difficult. One of the beneficial consequences of the Great Financial Crisis is that economic statisticians at for instance Eurostat or the Bank for International Settlements spend more effort on assembling house prices , though The Economist deserves praise as it led the way about 15 years ago. What do these data tell us? Low interest rates are...

On Tuesday 16th of March 2017 Robert Skidelsky and I launched my book The Reformation in Economics in the Clement Attlee room in the House of Lords. It has taken some time to upload these videos of Robert’s and my comments. Most of the speeches were captured but I have included my own text below (I did not end up sticking to the written comments verbatim). On a separate note, Brian Romanchuk has written a short review of the book here. [embedded content] [embedded content] Hi...

Do we need growth? Do we need technology? Is technology ‘neutral’ in the sense that its appearance and use can be understood without historical context? The Journal of Industrial Ecology has a special issue about such ideas. I love the kind of calculations they do about flows of stuff. But Vincent Moreau, Marlyne Sahakian, Pascal van Griethuysen and Francois Vuille have an apt observation. In light of the environmental consequences of linear production and consumption processes, the...

Recently, Germany introduced an economy wide minimum wage. This led to better jobs, better incomes, an increase in productivity, no upsurge in inflation and no decline of employment growth: “Higher wages, shorter hours The comparison of both worker groups shows that the minimum wage has worked. As intended, the hourly wage of the interviewed minimum wage workers rose from €6.70 to €8.20, an impressive 22 percent. This is a multiple of the wage increase in the control group, which amounted...

« Back I am reposting this at Dan’s suggestion as it relates to the recent post by Steve Roth.  I have edited it slightly along with a retitle to clean up some wording and hopefully have made it easier to read.  For those new here, my posts started with income inequality and a thought that we changed our economy as to how we would make money starting in the 80′s.   My one new thought is that the obvious political party to promote policy that addresses the...

In the USA and the EU, employment is up and unemployment is down. But unemployment is not yet low. Unemployment rates have to decline more (a bit in the USA, a lot in the EU) and participation rates have to recover (a lot in the USA, a bit in the EU). In the EU, there are large differences between countries (compare Spain with Germany). But on the macro level, there is still a large reservoir of involuntary unemployment and, looking at the participation rates, people who have given up...

Higher than expected, and last month revised up, however the trend is still lower. This report is only through May. The weekly bank loan report is as of June 28, and shows the down trend continuing, which generally reflects a deceleration in consumer spending: Highlights Consumer spending has been modest but consumers did run up their credit-card debt in May helping to lift consumer credit outstanding by a larger-than-expected $18.4 billion. Revolving credit, which is where...

Self Control is one of the defining music hits of the 1980s. It was first released in 1984 by Italian singer-songwriter Raf (his first single). It was also released almost contemporaneously by Laura Brannigan. The song includes these lyrics: You take my self you take my self control I I live among the creatures of the night I haven’t got the will to try and fight The first line of the quote I provided is wrong. Not in the sense that those words aren’t lyrics...