Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Still looks to me like it’s already rolled over: Less than expected indicating spending likely to be less than expected as well: Highlights Growth in consumer credit slowed in December, to $14.2 billion vs an upward revised $25.2 billion in November. Revolving credit showed less life in December than prior months, rising only $2.4 billion vs November’s $11.8 billion. Weakness here helps explain the general weakness in core shopping during December. Nonrevolving credit,...

by Andrew J. Brown On Saturday morning, January 28, 2017, at Conway Hall in Central London, long an important place for radical religious, philosophical, social and political thinking in the UK, DiEM25 held its UK organisational launch. Like all DiEM25 gatherings, more than half of the meeting was made up of conversations involving those attending. To set the scene and introduce some important initial ideas, the morning began with brief contributions from Brian Eno, Elif Şafak, Agnieszka...

from David Ruccio Readers know the old adage: in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. And, we should add, employers complaining they can’t find enough good workers. The fact is, if workers were really scarce, their wages would be rising dramatically. That’s how things works in a capitalist labor market: employers who want to hire workers offer higher wages. But, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly earnings of...

from Lars Syll Limiting model assumptions in economic science always have to be closely examined since if we are going to be able to show that the mechanisms or causes that we isolate and handle in our models are stable in the sense that they do not change when we “export” them to our “target systems”, we have to be able to show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a fortiori only are of limited value to our understanding, explanations or predictions of real...

from Asad Zaman Friday, 26th Jan 2017: Lecture by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE to students at University of Cambridge, Center of Development Studies for Religion & Development paper. 40 minute video recording of lecture on you-tube. Part 1: “What Is Spirituality?”:  Modern Secular thought takes spirituality and religion to be diseases which affect weak minds not properly trained in the scientific method. Part I of this lecture explains why this view, which is based on positivist ideas, is...

I saw three people wearing Tom Brady jerseys in the supermarket today.  I don’t watch football and I am bad with faces, but I would venture a guess that not one of the three was the Tom Brady who will be playing in the Super Bowl today.  For one, none of them looked the part.  If forced to provide a description of Tom Brady, I would go with somewhere north of 6 feet, fit, athletic and most importantly, somewhere else.  I don’t know where the Super Bowl is...

According to the European Commission, Spain does well. And it does: after 6 years of decline employment has increased with 1,2 million. This is, when it comes to EU job creation, a decisive development! But… well, look at graph 1. Employment is nowhere where it has to be. And double digit increases in the number of tourists won’t last forever – Spain will need a new growth sector (or a more equitable division of labor). When it comes to this:  half of the employment increase took place...

Ashoka Mody on Bloomberg Then came the cardinal error: At the IMF’s Board, over the fierce opposition of several executive directors, the Europeans and Americans pushed through a bailout program that, contrary to the fund’s rules, did not impose losses on Greece’s private creditors. The decision was based on a spurious claim that “restructuring” private debt would trigger a global financial meltdown. Thus, European governments and the IMF lent Greece a vast sum to repay its existing...

In an article in today’s Mail on Sunday, David Rose makes the extraordinary claim that “world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data, accusing the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of manipulating the data to show more warming in a 2015 study by Tom Karl and coauthors. What he fails to mention is that the new NOAA results have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and that many other...