Tag Archives: Uncategorized

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...

The ‘The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’ has much more often than the prizes for physics, Chemistry and physiology and medicine been awarded for: theory. It was on a regular basis awarded for analysis of data or the discovery of new events but in these cases ‘discovery’ was contrary to the other sciences much less important than analysis. It was only rarely awarded for the development of measurement techniques. I’m preparing what might become a...

A bit weaker than expected, prior month revisions about a wash. Highlights Retail sales did recover in April but not as much as expected, up 0.4 percent overall and up 0.3 percent excluding autos which both miss Econoday’s consensus estimates by 2 tenths. Core readings are likewise soft, up 0.3 percent ex-auto ex-gas which misses the consensus by 1 tenth and up only 0.2 percent for the control group where a 0.4 percent gain was the call. Vehicle sales rose 0.7 percent in...

from Lars Syll The fallacy of composition basically consists of the false belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts.  In the society and in the economy this is arguably not the case. An adequate analysis of society and economy a fortiori can’t proceed by just adding up the acts and decisions of individuals. The whole is more than a sum of parts. This fact shows up when orthodox/mainstream/neoclassical economics tries to argue for the existence of The Law of Demand – when...

from Norbert Häring In the April-edition of their monthly report, the Bundesbank has belatedly joined the Bank of England in explicitly stating that the treatment of banks and money creation in most textbooks is wrong: banks are not intermediaries; they create money ex-nihilo. This helps the Bundesbank to reject criticism that central banks are currently “printing” too much money. At the same time, the Bundesbank rejects the proposal of 100%-money, i.e. bank deposits fully backed by...

Energy capex collapsed first, followed by non energy capex about a year later. Question now is whether the Q1 non energy capex recovery continues into Q2. I suspect not. In any case the contribution to growth from energy capex is no longer negative but not all that much as a % of GDP: Tells me we still are experience an obvious lack of aggregate demand. We haven’t even gotten back prior highs and growth of these components has slowed dramatically from where it was before...

You can see how central bank reserve shifting worked to lower the euro vs the dollar. Yes, we need a larger deficit, both short and long term, given current institutional structure that gives powerful incentives to not spend income. Not that the current proposals to do that are my first choice as to specific taxes to cut and expenditures to increase. Nor would I call it pump priming, but instead I’d call it removing fiscal restrictions: Trump: Debt and deficits will rise,...

from Peter Radford I don’t understand why people get upset when I say that economics is a waste of time. I suppose it’s because I don’t make a clear enough difference between economics as a general topic and economics as a formal, mainstream, body of knowledge. It’s the latter that is a waste of time. The former is wonderfully interesting. At its heart economics is a study of human behavior, where that behavior is specific to certain activities. It is thus deeply rooted in psychology, so...

Announcing the New Map of New Deal New YorkTwo years in the making, The Living New Deal’s newest publication, a “Map and Guide to New Deal New York,” highlights nearly 1,000 public works throughout the five boroughs and describes 50 of the city’s notable New Deal buildings, parks, murals, and other sites and artworks. The 18 x 27 inch, multi-color map folds to pocket size, while three inset maps offer walking tours of the New Deal in Central Park, and Midtown and Downtown Manhattan....