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Trumped up expectations are fading a bit while ‘hard data’ continues to fade. And note the real disposable personal income chart which continues its deceleration that began when oil capex collapsed: Highlights A second month of weak spending on services pulled down on consumer spending which could only manage a 0.1 percent rise in February, one that follows a nearly as weak 0.2 percent gain in January. February’s result is below consensus and at the low end of the Econoday...

from Michael Hudson At the time this volume is going to press, there is no way of knowing how successful these international reversals will be. What is more clear is what Trump’s political impact will have at home. His victory – or more accurately, Hillary’s resounding loss and the way she lost – has encouraged enormous pressure for a realignment of both parties. Regardless of what President Trump may achieve vis-à-vis Europe, his actions as celebrity chaos agent may break up U.S....

from Lars Syll It is well known that even experienced scientists routinely misinterpret p-values in all sorts of ways, including confusion of statistical and practical significance, treating non-rejection as acceptance of the null hypothesis, and interpreting the p-value as some sort of replication probability or as the posterior probability that the null hypothesis is true … It is shocking that these errors seem so hard-wired into statisticians’ thinking, and this suggests that our...

from: Merijn Knibbe Brexit should not have happened. But, understandably, it did. Brussels bears a large part of the blame: they could and should have known. The title of this blog is an allusion to the 1992 Wayne Godley article ‘Maastricht and all that’ in which he predicted the present day troubles of the Eurozone. People (in Brussels) should have listened. People (in Brussels) should still listen. If a country does not have its own money it is not really sovereign – unless it has...

Trump is claiming he can restore coal mining to its former glory by reversing the new regulations that Obama enacted. Obvious he has no idea what the history of employment in coal mining is. Just note that it peaked in 1923

from Dean Baker There have been a flood of opinion pieces and news stories in recent weeks wrongly telling people that it was not trade that led to the loss of manufacturing jobs in recent years, but rather automation. This means that all of those people who are worried about trade deficits costing jobs are simply being silly. The promulgators of the automation story want everyone to stop talking about trade and instead focus on education, technology or whatever other item they can throw...

from David Ruccio We don’t need Louisiana Detective Rodie Sanchez coming out of retirement to solve the crime against the members of the working-class currently being committed in the United States. We already know many of the details of the crime. We also know the identities of both the victims and the serial killer. The only real mystery is, what’s the country going to do about it?   The investigation itself is being painstakingly carried out by Anne Case and Agnus Deaton (pdf). They...

from Steven Pressman According to Thomas Piketty (2014), between 1980 and 2010 the share of total US income going to the top 10% of earners rose from around 30-35%, where it stood for several decades, to nearly 50%. These are very conservative estimates. Piketty’s figures come from the distribution of adjusted gross income (AGI), reported by the US Internal Revenue Service. AGI subtracts from income things like investment losses, retirement account contributions and their returns (see...

So they used to tell the story about a guy who claimed he could make cars out of wood, and he started a company in Oregon that brought trees into one door of his giant building with new cars coming out of another door, and he wouldn’t let anyone inside to see how it was done. He was given a award for innovation and widely acclaimed, until one day someone got inside and saw he was shipping the trees out the back to Japan and bringing in new Korean cars. He was then arrested...