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from Dean Baker Yes, as Un-American as that may sound, Bill Gates is proposing a tax that would undermine Donald Trump’s efforts to speed the rate of economic growth. Gates wants to tax productivity growth (a.k.a. “automation) slowing down the rate at which the economy becomes more efficient. This might seem a bizarre policy proposal at a time when productivity growth has been at record lows, averaging less than 1.0 percent annually for the last decade. This compares to rates of close to...

From The lancet Remarkably, 8 years after the onset of the global financial crisis, the consequences for health are still being debated, even in Greece, the country most severely affected by the economic downturn. There can be few better indications of the low priority accorded to health within governments than the difference between the concerted efforts dedicated to understanding the state of the economy and the apparent scarcity of concern about the health of populations. Economists...

Ideas Towards a New International Financial Architecture (Wea-Books) Paperback – February 2017 by Oscar Ugarteche (Editor), Alicia Payana (Editor), Maria Alejandra Madi (Editor) In the short span of a few essays, this book takes the reader on a trip from the historical roots of the current financial architecture to the imaginable futures one can envision for it, only if there is the political will to change it. If we accept that, as put by the editors, financial markets’...

Manhattan condo market cracking, developers roll out big incentives Manhattan saw rampant new construction since the recession, and thousands of new luxury units flooded the market, with stark consequences. The median sale price for new construction ended 2016 down 44 percent, compared with the end of 2015, according to a quarterly report from Miller Samuel for Douglas Elliman. Closed sales dropped 13 percent. Most worrisome, the supply of condos for sale rose a striking...

from David Ruccio The latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit (pdf) from the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data showed a substantial increase in aggregate household debt balances in the fourth quarter of 2016 and for the year as a whole. As of 31 December 2016, total household debt stood at $12.58 trillion, an increase of $226 billion (or 1.8 percent) from the third quarter of 2016. Total household debt is now just 0.8 percent ($99 billion) below its third quarter...

C-Span just released a ranking of US Presidents based based on a survey of historians, journalists and other scholars. Obama came in 12th. Here is the survey’s description of the process used to generate the rankings: C-SPAN’s academic advisors devised a survey in which participants used a one (“not effective”) to ten (“very effective”) scale to rate each president on ten qualities of presidential leadership: “Public Persuasion,” “Crisis Leadership,”...

from Lars Syll If all agents are supposed to have rational expectations, it becomes convenient to assume also that they all have the same expectation and thence tempting to jump to the conclusion that the collective of agents behaves as one. The usual objection to representative agent models has been that it fails to take into account well-documented systematic differences in behaviour between age groups, income classes, etc. In the financial crisis context, however, the objection is...

This is very euro friendly stuff. Euro Area Current Account Eurozone’s current account surplus widened sharply to EUR 47.0 billion from EUR 41.4 billion in the same month of the previous year. The primary income surplus increased firmly to EUR 18.2 billion from EUR 13.0 billion a year ago and the goods surplus rose to EUR 32.8 billion from EUR 31.4 billion, while the services surplus was nearly unchanged at EUR 6.4 billion. Meanwhile, the secondary income deficit rose to EUR...

from David Ruccio Mainstream economics presents quite a spectacle these days. It has no real theory of the firm and, even now, more than nine years after the Great Recession began, its most cherished claim to relevance—the use of large-scale forecasting models of the economy that assume people always behave rationally—is still misleading policymakers. As if that weren’t embarrassing enough, we now have a leading mainstream economist, Havard’s Martin Feldstein, claiming that the “official...

CNBC carries the whole deal: [embedded content]