Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from Mark Weisbrot Much of the media, and the analysts on which it relies, have provided a misleading narrative on the current political problems in Italy, following Sunday’s “no” vote on a referendum on constitutional changes. It has been lumped together with Trump, Brexit, the upsurge of extreme right-wing, anti-European or racist political parties and “populism,” ― which in much of the media seems to be code for demagogic politicians persuading ignorant masses to vote for stupid...

No clear signal for what might come next with regard to the price of oil: Saudis set prices (above) and then let their clients buy all they want at the posted prices. The chart shows clients have been buying a bit more lately, but not anywhere near the Saudis currently presumed daily capacity of about 12 million barrels per day:

from David Ruccio President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to bribe Carrier into keeping 800 manufacturing jobs in Indiana, instead of moving them to one of its Mexican plants, has met with opposition from mainstream economists, both liberal and conservative. Clearly, it’s not about the size of the deal (although $7 million in incentives to keep less than one thousand jobs is a big deal). Carrier corporate parent United Technologies is still planning to outsource production that will...

One of the most idiosyncratic developments of the last decades is the rise of mortality of white middle aged USA citizens (graph). According to Anna Case and Angus Deaton this was closely related to abuse of alcohol and opioids.  (see graph). The 2015 data are just in: this trend continued (and black men joined it). People were somehow aware of this: the larger the deterioration in health, the larger the swing towards Trump during the recent USA elections (the best postdictor of the...

“the surge in inequality and the stagnation of wages” from Peter Radford I listened last night to Matt Dickinson from Middlebury college give a talk about the recent election. This is my synopsis: The election did not represent much of a change in voter patterns. Trump’s victory was based more on a tweak rather than a reconstruction of the voting patterns of the 2012 election. So this was not a revolutionary moment, marking, instead, a logical further step in a longer term trend. That...

Looks a lot like the top looked back in 2007? Declining growth of consumer credit means credit driven spending isn’t adding as much to GDP this year as it did last year: Highlights Consumer credit keeps expanding including moderate and consistent gains for credit cards. Consumer credit outstanding rose $16.0 billion in October, driven as usual by vehicle financing and student loans but also by revolving credit which is where credit-card debt is tracked. Revolving credit rose...

from Asad Zaman Prior to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC 2007), many senior economists and policy makers expressed confidence that they had finally solved the problem of business cycles, booms and busts, that plagues capitalism. Because of this over-confidence, early warnings of a looming crisis by Nouriel Roubini, Ann Pettifor, Peter Schiff, Steven Keen, Dean Baker, and Raghuram Rajan, were ridiculed and dismissed. Even after the crisis, many economists thought this was a minor glitch,...

from David Ruccio President-elect Donald Trump has inherited an economy that is as divided as the electorate. The question is, what will that economy look like if and when Trump’s right-wing national-populist promises and post-election proposals are enacted? As I have shown in the three installments of the first part of this series, “Class Before Trumponomics” (here, here, and here), over the course of recent decades and continuing through the crash and recovery, the class nature of the...

Trade deficit moving back out. I expect a lot more to come this quarter and next. Oil is getting more expensive and the quantity imported is up as well. The ‘one time’ soybean export bulge is behind us, and global trade in general has slowed. Wouldn’t surprise me if Trump responds by having the US start buying foreign currencies, which would send the dollar lower to offset ‘foreign currency manipulation’. And, of course, he’d show a ‘profit’ in fx purchases as the dollar...

from Dean Baker During the campaign Donald Trump boasted that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t affect his standing among his supporters. Whether or not this is true, this appears to be the approach that Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking to their role in governing. The basic story is that they can rip off the public as much as they want, because ain’t no one going to stop them. They could be right. The most immediate issue is Trump’s refusal to sell his...