Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll Until a few years ago, economists of all persuasions confidently proclaimed that the Great Depression would never recur. In a way, they were right. After the financial crisis of 2008 erupted, we got the Great Recession instead. Governments managed to limit the damage by pumping huge amounts of money into the global economy and slashing interest rates to near zero. But, having cut off the downward slide of 2008-2009, they ran out of intellectual and political ammunition....

Commentary 1. I was bouncing around twitter and landed on the following tweet. It may be the best commentary on where we are that I have read. (click to embiggen or to see the whole picture) Obligatory comment: I know nothing about the individual who left the tweet. To the best of my knowledge I have never seen a tweet by that person before. I haven’t checked his (her? zir?) other tweets to know whether I should endorse or denounce him (her? zir?).  But...

Home prices may be softening, but too soon to tell: Highlights The FHFA house price index came in at a very soft 0.1 percent increase in June, well short of Econoday’s consensus for 0.5 percent and low estimate of 0.3 percent. This is both good news and bad news, as slowing price appreciation should help affordability for home sales but will also limit growth in household wealth. Despite June’s weakness, year-on-year prices remain very strong, at plus 6.5 percent which is...

from The Daily Californian (Berkeley) A recent study on gender stereotypes in the anonymous online forum Economics Job Market Rumors, or EJMR, revealed what appears to be a hostile environment toward women in some circles of the economics field. Recent campus graduate Alice Wu conducted the study as part of her senior thesis, using EJMR posts from 2014 to 2016. The focus of the study, according to Wu, was to “examine whether people in academia portray and judge women and men differently...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Trump and What Army? Donald Trump is no stranger to outrageous public poses and statements, but his refusal to condemn white supremacists post-Charlottesville has apparently struck a nerve. Has he crossed some sort of new line? Here are some dark, speculative thoughts about the events of the past few days. I believe Trump’s impeachment is an option that political and financial elites are holding in...

from Dean Baker When workers are doing badly you can always count on a large number of economists to come forward with ways to argue it really ain’t so. For example, we have heard endless stories about how our price indices hugely overstate inflation — we’re actually way better off than we think we are. Or, they point to the growth in non-wage benefits. One problem with that story is that non-wage benefits have been shrinking as a share of total compensation in recent years, not growing,...

Yves Smith notes on the Boston rally this Saturday: Thanks to a huge and well-organized police presence, as well as strict limits imposed on the participants, follow-up to the “Unite the Right” white supremacist event in Charlottesville, the “Boston Free Speech” rally on Saturday demonstrated that the community wasn’t about to cut extreme right wing agitators much slack: “We probably had 40,000 people out here standing tall against hatred and bigotry in...

The United Nations peddles garden variety sexism and racism disguised as data. Case in point is the the 2014 United Nations Global Homicide Book. Figure 1.3 and Map 1.2 (which promote racism), or Figure 5.6 (which perpetuates sexist notions) are particularly problematic. I for one refudiate the report.

from David Ruccio Russia is back in the news again in the United States, with the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election as well as a growing set of links between a variety of figures (including Cabinet and family members) associated with Donald Trump and the regime of Vladimir Putin.  This year is also the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, which sought to create the conditions for a transition to communism in the midst of a society...