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from Norbert Häring In its April monthly report, Deutsche Bundesbank explains that banks create money ex-nihilo and rejects the proposal of 100%-money. The full English version is now online. The arguments employed to discredit 100%-money are a mix of sophistry and misleading or false statements. With some delay, Bundesbank has joined the Bank of England in explicitly stating that the treatment of banks and money creation in most textbooks is wrong and that banks are not intermediaries,...

from Dean Baker Donald Trump has openly said that he doesn’t care at all about the rules that prohibit the president and those around him from profiting from their government positions. In breaking with longstanding precedent, he is holding on to his business empire and having his children run it as he carries on with the business of being president. With the government forced to pay the bills for the Secret Service to stay at his golf resorts and hotels, Trump obviously feels no...

from Lars Syll In a blog post the other day, Noah Smith returned again to the discussion about the ’empirical revolution’ in economics and how to — if it really does exist — evaluate it. Counter those who think quasi-experiments and RCTs are the true solutions to finding causal parameters, Noah argues that without structural models empirical results are only locally valid. And you don’t really know how local “local” is. If you find that raising the minimum wage from $10 to $12 doesn’t...

Trumped up expectations reversing? Highlights Activity in the New York manufacturing region is flattening out this month following a run of unusually strong growth. May’s Empire State index came in at a lower-than-expected minus 1.0 with new orders also moving into the negative column to minus 4.4. Unfilled orders, which were very strong in April and March, also moved below zero to minus 3.7. But the strength in prior orders is keeping production up, at a very solid plus...

by Sandwichman The “Tapes” Threat This may be so obvious it needs no explanation — but allow me to explain. This tweet puts on notice anyone who has a conversation with the POTUS that whatever they say MAY be recorded and selectively “leaked” for the purpose of blackmail, extortion and/or intimidation. That should be an effective strategy for ensuring candid, confidential communication and advice. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan may be too stupid to realize...

Noah Smith is not the first one to be puzzled by the rift between theory and measurement in economics. He states: “econ seems too focused on “theory vs. evidence” instead of using the two in conjunction. And when they do get used in conjunction, it’s often in a tacked-on, pro-forma sort of way, without a real meaningful interplay between the two. Of course, this is just my own limited experience, and there are whole fields – industrial organization, environmental economics, trade – that I...

from Dean Baker Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. We hear endless stories in the media about how the robots are taking all the jobs. There was a new rush of such stories after the release of a study by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, which found that robots were responsible for a substantial share of the job loss in manufacturing in the last decade. (For example, this Bloomberg piece by Mira Rojanasakul and Peter Coy.) However, there remains a very basic problem in the robot...

from Mark Weisbrot The media response to the French election reads like some people had too much cannabis. From the first paragraph of a front page news analysis of the New York Times: “It was globalization against nationalism. It was the future versus the past. Open versus closed.” Let’s not get carried away. It’s great that Marine Le Pen, whose National Front party with deep racist roots that go back to French collaborators during the Nazi occupation, as well as French colonialism, was...

from David Ruccio As regular readers of this blog know, I am no fan of the way healthcare is currently organized in the United States. The U.S. healthcare system, as it is currently configured, only really works for those who make a profit—selling health insurance, pharmaceuticals, and in-patient and acute-care services in hospitals—and those who have the wherewithal to finance their own healthcare. But Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and replace it with...