Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Mark Weisbrot President Trump is unlikely to fulfill his dream of forcing Mexico to pay for his proposed wall along the United States’ southern border. If it is built, it would almost certainly be US taxpayers footing the bill, with some estimates as high as $50 billion. But it’s worth taking a step back to look at the economics of US-Mexican relations, to see how immigration from Mexico even became an issue in US politics that someone like Trump could try to use to his advantage....

- by New Deal democrat Gas prices and likely January inflation to continue the stall in real wage growth A big relatively unnoticed concern over the last year has been the end of deflation due to the end of the decline in gas prices.  Coupled with really tepid wage growth, this is going to affect consumers, who are 70% of the US economy. Gas prices aren’t a headwind yet.  They have increased about 25% YoY.  In the past, it has taken a 40% or more spike YoY to...

from Lars Syll The 2017 OECD Economic Survey of Sweden — presented today in Stockholm by OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría and Sweden’s Minister of Finance Magdalena Andersson — points out that income inequality in Sweden has been rising since the 1990s. I would say that what we see happen in Sweden is deeply disturbing. The rising inequality is outrageous – not the least since it has to a large extent to do with income and wealth increasingly being concentrated in the hands of a very...

Trumped up expectations fading: No telling why our new President changed his mind on this one. Might have something to do with a kosher house being a two china policy… ;) White House confirms Trump’s agreement to honor ‘One China’ policy By Everett Rosenfeld Feb 10 (CNBC) — A White House statement confirmed a Thursday night report that President Donald Trump had agreed to honor China’s “One China” policy in his first call with the country’s president.“President Donald J....

from Peter Radford While I was checking the inner debates the Republicans are having about health care I came across this quote [in an article written by Tierney Sneed in TPM] from Representative David Brat, an extreme right winger: “When it comes to how much you want to park in the HSAs for providing catastrophic care, that, when it comes, to the safety net, we have to find the Milton Friedman way of doing that,” Brat said. “The Price bill would do tax credits. I am not a fan of those...

from David Ruccio The U.S. economic pie couldn’t be carved up much more unequally. The top 10 percent manages to capture about 47 percent of total pre-tax income, while the bottom 90 gets the rest. The top 1 percent alone walks away with 20 percent of national income.   And, of course, the distribution of wealth is even more unequal: the bottom 90 percent owns only 28 percent of total household wealth, while those in the top 1 percent own more than 37 percent. As Justin Fox explains, the...

Highlights Inventories have been on the climb raising the risk of unwanted overhang. But overhang isn’t the story of the December wholesale trade report where a large 1.0 percent build is far outmatched by a 2.6 percent surge in sales. The results pull the stock-to-sales ratio down sharply to 1.29 from 1.31. Wholesale auto inventories rose 2.0 percent in December, a month that proved very strong for retail auto sales and was also very strong for wholesale sales where autos...

from today’s Guardian In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students’ first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts. Without us...

from Lars Syll The trouble is, too many theorists — especially in the mainstream of the discipline — have drifted far from the real world. Their ambition has been to build mathematically elegant and internally consistent models of the economy, even if that requires wholly unrealistic assumptions. Granted, just as maps have to simplify complex terrain, theoretical models must ignore aspects of reality to be any use. But there’s a line between simplification and gross distortion, and modern...