Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The Fed continues to fail to meet it’s target. They just need a little more time… ;)And coincidentally this is inline with the credit deceleration as previously discussed: Highlights In what is one of the very weakest 4-month stretch in 60 years of records, core consumer prices could manage only a 0.1 percent increase in June. This is the third straight 0.1 percent showing for the core (ex food & energy) that was preceded by the very rare 0.1 percent decline in March....

Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate are not satisfied with the Tom Price appointed CBO chief, who insists that there are four fingers in front of his face and apparently won’t make numbers up to help take away health insurance from 22 million people. So Mitch McConnell and the Republicans will rely upon, and I am not making this up, “ALTERNATIVE SCORING” to further the Ted Cruz amendment to Obamacare repeal through the Senate. Republicans are...

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...