Tag Archives: Uncategorized

by New Deal democrat A thought for Sunday: for now the economy remains on automatic pilot –and that’s good How much, if any, of the economy, has been influenced by the Trump/Ryan GOP government in Washington to date?  With one exception, not much I think. First of all, while the jobs report was certainly good, was no better than the average report from 2014 or 2015 — or 4 of the last 8 months, for that matter: And it wasn’t just foreseeable, it was...

Note how it’s all been decelerating since the collapse in oil capex, and most recently the deceleration hasintensified: This is the absolute level of loans outstanding, which seems to only go negative like this in recessionsThis is the annual growth rate which appears to be in a state of collapse: Note the pattern of accelerating into recession, then decelerating:

from David Ruccio It is likely, if some version of Trump/Ryancare is approved in the United States, millions more people will not be able to purchase the insurance necessary to receive adequate healthcare.   The problem is, the United States is already an outlier when it comes to the relationship between health expenditures and health outcomes—measured in this case by life expectancy. As Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser explain, all countries in this graph have followed an upward...

Jonathan Portes asks, “What’s the role of experts in the public debate?” He assumes it is his prerogative, as an expert, to define that role: I think we have three really important functions. First, to explain our basic concepts and most important insights in plain English. Famously, Paul Samuelson, the founder of modern macroeconomics, was asked whether economics told us anything that was true but not obvious.  It took him a couple of years, but eventually...

from Peter Radford We all ought calm down about the Trump budget. Presidential budgets never, ever, get put into practice. They are simply exercises in politics. They simply give us insight into presidential goals. In Trump’s case there is nothing that we didn’t already know. He wants to slash domestic programs, especially those niggling ones that offend his far right fans, and pile on the offensive weaponry for the Pentagon. As I said: no big surprise. Here’s a very short synopsis of the...

from Lars Syll Currently the dominant formalism for treating the [general gamble] problem is utility theory. Utility theory was born out of the failure of the following behavioral null model: individuals were assumed to optimize changes in the expectation values of their wealth. We argue that this null model is a priori a bad starting point because the expectation value of wealth does not generally reflect what happens over time. We propose a different null model of human behavior that...

A few weeks ago I had a post looking at the success of a number of countries. I noted that countries that do well include, (in no particular order): the US, Canada, Northwest Europe, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and, until China began applying a heavier thumb, Hong Kong. Those also happen to be the countries that would attract the most foreigners interested in being citizens, so this quick and dirty list...

from Dean Baker Over the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong. In the mid-1990s, all the great minds in the field agreed that the unemployment rate could not fall much below 6 percent without triggering spiraling inflation. It turns out that the unemployment rate could fall to 4 percent as a year-round average in 2000, with no visible uptick in the inflation rate. As the stock bubble that drove the...

No houses built without a permit: Highlights Strength in single-family permits leads a mostly favorable housing starts report for February where however the headlines are mixed, at a 1.288 million annualized rate for starts and a 1.213 million rate for total permits. The results compare with Econoday expectations of 1.270 million for both. Permits for single-family homes, where building costs and sale prices are the highest, rose 3.1 percent in February to an 832,000 rate...