Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Lars Syll There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008 … Many among the heterodox would have us believe that their paradigm worked perfectly well in 2008 and after … This is dramatically overselling the product. First, heterodox models didn’t “predict” the crisis in the sense of an actual quantitative forecast. This is because much of heterodox theory is non-quantitative. Basically, people write down English words explaining their...

The growth rate has slowed and the level of apps remains depressed: Nice move up. This is just a forecast of Friday’s number: Highlights The February employment report looks to be a blockbuster based on ADP’s estimate for giant growth of 298,000 in private payrolls. This would be the biggest gain since October 2015 and one of the very largest of the cycle. ADP isn’t always followed closely but its call last month for outsized growth in January payrolls did prove correct....

from Dean Baker With the Trans-Pacific Partnership now definitely dead and Donald Trump pushing for a renegotiation of NAFTA, many progressives are looking for a fundamental re-examination of trade deals. As supporters of international cooperation rather than narrow nationalists, progressives have often felt uncomfortable opposing trade deals. While there is no reason to be defensive about opposing trade deals that favored business interests at the expense of workers, consumers, and the...

from Peter Radford Well, the wait is over. We now know what the Republican health care plan looks like. It’s early days and the inevitable compromises will have to be made, but the Republican seven year crusade is reaching its climax. Or not. The problem is this: as we have discussed many times, any credible health care plan needs a number of key features. Three stand out: You need to ensure the biggest insurance pool you can. In an ideal world this pool would be the entire population of...

As previously discussed, trade looks to be more negative in q1 than it was in q4: Highlights January’s trade deficit came in very deep but at least right on expectations, at $48.5 billion and reflecting a surge in foreign consumer and vehicle imports and higher prices for imported oil. January imports rose 2.3 percent from December to $197.6 billion with imports of consumer goods jumping 2.4 percent to $52.1 billion and with vehicle imports up 1.3 percent to $13.6 billion....

from David Ruccio According to recent news reports, Kevin Hassett, the State Farm James Q. Wilson Chair in American Politics and Culture at the American Enterprise Institute (no, I didn’t make that up), will soon be named the head of Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Yes, that Kevin Hassett, the one who in 1999 predicted the Down Jones Industrial Average would rise to 36,000 within a few years. Except, of course, it didn’t. Not by a long shot. The average did reach a record...

from Lars Syll In his book Why Minsky Matters L. Randall Wray tries to explain in what way Hyman Minsky’s thoughts offer a radical challenge to mainstream economic theory. Although there were a handful of economists who had warned as early as 2000 about the possibility of a crisis, Minsky’s warnings actually began a half century earlier—with publications in 1957 that set out his vision of financial instability. Over the next forty years, he refined and continually updated the theory. It...

from Norbert Häring To “prepare the next generation of world leaders”, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will hold its 2017 MIT India Conference, this time  on “Digital India”. Members of the Indian government and CEOs are travelling to Cambridge to report on the “success” of the US inspired crackdown on the use of cash. As usual, the plight of the cash-using poor and the data-security and privacy nightmare resulting from mandatory biometric identification are unlikely to be...

Back to slow growth from the lower levels: Durable goods orders: Capital goods: It’s gone from bad to worse. Hard to see how this can continue much longer: Trump’s Wiretap Claims: What We Know and What We Don’t White House sources acknowledge that Trump had no idea whether the claims he was making were true when he made them. He was basing his claims on media reports—some of them months old—about the possibility that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court may have...