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from Norbert Häring The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington has published a Working Paper on “de-cashing”. It gives advice to governments who want to abolish cash against the will of their citizenry. Move slowly, start with harmless seeming measures, is part of that advice. In “The Macroeconomics of De-Cashing”, IMF-Analyst Alexei Kireyev recommends in his conclusions: Although some countries most likely will de-cash in a few years, going completely cashless should be phased...

Looks like Saudis are moving to lower prices? Saudi Aramco Said to Cut Pricing For May Arab Light Oil to Asia By Serene Cheong and Sharon Cho Apr 5 (Bloomberg) — Saudi Aramco sets Arab Light crude differential at 45c/bbl discount to Oman-Dubai benchmark for May sales to Asia, say people with knowledge of matter who asked not to be identified because the information is confidential. That’s a 30c/bbl decrease from April OSP NOTE: Co. was expected to decrease Arab Light...

from David Ruccio This semester, we’re teaching A Tale of Two Depressions, a course designed as a comparison of the first and second Great Depressions in the United States. And one of the themes of the course is that, in considering the conditions and consequences of the two depressions, we’re talking about a tale of two countries. As it turns out, the tale of two countries may be even more true in the case of the most recent crises of capitalism. That’s because the two countries were...

from Robert Wade In this context globalization refers to the opening of domestic markets and the integration of global production via multinational corporations (MNCs). More broadly, it refers to  movement in the world economy towards “one country”, or “deep (not shallow) integration”, where nation states have no more influence over flows of goods, services, capital, finance, ideas and people across borders than South Dakota or the other US states have across theirs. Ever since the 1980s...

from Asad Zaman I am currently engaged in teaching the final semester of Advanced Micro in our Ph.D. program. I have freedom to do here at PIDE, Pakistan, what may be extremely difficult in US/Europe — My course is built around demonstrating how conventional micro theory is strongly contradicted by empirical evidence. I also go on to build a convincing alternative. The first lecture on micro topics, starts by dismantling the fundamental Supply and Demand model in the context of the Labor...

Higher than expected but last month was revised down by 53,000 (and same could happen of course for this month). And this is just a forecast for the Friday jobs report, not a hard number. Also note that as per the chart the annual growth rate has been declining and it’s too soon to say that the decline has reversed: Highlights The March employment report may not prove as impressive as February or January but it still looks to be very strong, based on ADP’s 263,000 estimate...

The euro zone (EZ) was created in January 1999. Its weak economic performance is significantly due to the euro’s neoliberal monetary architecture and the design of monetary policy. Those features undermine national political sovereignty and consign the EZ to severe economic under-performance, which in turn fosters political demands for exit from the euro. Escaping this [...]

from Lars Syll Modern mainstream (neoclassical) economics relies to a large degree on the notion of probability. To at all be amenable to applied economic analysis, economic observations allegedly have to be conceived as random events that are analyzable within a probabilistic framework. But is it really necessary to model the economic system as a system where randomness can only be analyzed and understood when based on an a priori notion of probability? When attempting to convince us of...

The trade deficit was a bit less than expected, all due to lower imports. The question is whether this means there were more domestic purchases, whether this is an indicator of lower aggregate demand: HighlightsIn favorable news for first-quarter GDP, the nation’s trade gap hit Econoday’s low estimate in February at $43.6 billion and reflects a 1.8 percent drop in imports but only a 0.2 percent gain for exports. The goods deficit came in at $65.0 billion vs $64.8 billion in...