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Larger than expected and last month revised higher, indicating GDP was a bit lower than estimated, and weak sales matched with weak inventories don’t clear the shelves: Highlights A key early indication on the strength of second-quarter GDP is not favorable as the nation’s goods deficit widened $2.5 billion in April to $67.6 billion. Exports of goods continue to show weakness, down 0.9 percent in the month to $125.9 billion that show sharp declines for vehicles and consumer...

from Lars Syll So what’s wrong with the economy? … A 2002 study of United States fiscal policy by the economists Olivier Blanchard and Roberto Perotti found that ‘both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending.’ They noted that this finding is ‘difficult to reconcile with Keynesian theory.’ Consistent with this, a more recent study of international data by the economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna found...

from David Ruccio I continue to maintain that Congressional Republicans will stick with President Donald Trump until they get their favorite policies enacted—or until Trump’s missteps and declining popularity stand in the way of their getting what they want. And one of the things they want is tax reform—specifically, a cut in corporate taxes. Here’s the problem: U.S. corporations aren’t taxed too heavily. They’re taxed too little. As is clear from the chart above, corporate profits (as a...

Not good: Highlights Purchase applications for home mortgages fell a seasonally adjusted 1 percent in the May 19 week, but refinancing applications rose 11 percent from the previous week to the highest level since March. The drop in purchase applications follows a 3 percent decrease in the prior week and takes the year-on-year purchase index gain down 6 percentage points to 3 percent. Lower rates during the week gave a big boost to refinancing, and the refinancing share of...

From a story in The Globe and Mail The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the...

Seems to be slowing in line with the deceleration in mortgage lending previously discussed: Highlights In a mixed report that confirms a reputation for unusual volatility, new home sales swung 11.4 percent lower in April to a much lower-than-expected annualized rate of 569,000. The offset is a 40,000 upward revision to March and February, now at 642,000 and 607,000. Averages are essential to evaluate this report and here the news is clearly good, at a 3-month average of...

Trumponomics: How Trump skillfully used anti-globalization as bait to cover up his extremely neoliberal switch. A key element of Trump’s political success has been his masquerade of being pro-worker, which includes posturing as being anti-globalization. However, his true economic interests are the exact opposite. That creates conflict between Trump’s political and economic interests. For political leaders [...]

Readers of this blog might have noticed that I prefer to detrend time series using a moving average – and not the advanced and routinely and widely used Hodrick-Prescott filter. Part of this was lazyness. But I also do not like the HP filter: what is it? Why does it wag its tails so much? What is the ‘right’ smoothing parameter? James D. Hamilton has answered my questions (while implicating that loads of research is at least suspect if not worthless): Why You should never use the...

from Maria Alejandra Madi As Edward Fullbrook highlights in his recent book Narrative Fixation in Economics, the Cartesian view of human reality has deeply shaped the way Neoclassical Economics theorizes about the economic and social existence (2016, p. 45). Indeed, while emphasizing the relevance of the pure thought of a disembedded human subject,  Neoclassical Economics has reinforced the relevance of the Cartesian method of inquiry  that moved the so called scientific (true) knowledge ...