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Most tables of the normal distribution stop at 3 standard distributions or, to state this differently, at the point were (assuming a stable world) the chance that an individual estimate of a variable is farther removed from the average of all estimated variables is 1:1000. Let’s call this the black swan point. Estimates further removed from the average are ‘black swans’. Such estimates might indicate that we’ve moved to a new situation with a new average. Ahem: arctic and antarctic sea...

from Maria Alejandra Madi The huge growth of deregulated finance has been associated to a new financial regime and great transformations in the pattern of economic growth. Looking back, there has been  a narrow relationship between the crisis of the post-war accumulation pattern, the evolution of the international monetary system and the process of financial deregulation. In fact, as Bello (2006) warned, in the 1980s, Reaganism and structural adjustment were not successful attempts to...

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of his employer. The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States will likely go down in history for any number of reasons. But let us leave this to one side for a moment and survey some of the collateral damage generated by the election. I am thinking of the pollsters. By all accounts these pollsters – specifically the pollster-cum-pundits – failed miserably in this election. Let us...

from Peter Radford Well, that was fun. A rebellion has swept away the establishment. I never thought I would say that the rebellion would be manifested within the GOP and that the establishment would be within the Democrats, but that’s what we just witnessed. We on the left must accept that whatever we were saying just didn’t resonate with enough people. The Democrat’s obsession with identity politics that allowed it to ignore the consequences of its embrace of neoliberal economics has...

A bit of a Trump boost, but the general downtrend of the last couple of years is still intact: Retail Employment Gains Fall 21% From A Year Ago By Challenger Gray and Christmas Nov 10 (Econintersect) — Despite largescale hiring announcements from numerous major retailers, the number of October employment gains in the sector declined 21 percent from a year ago to 154,600. That was the fewest job gains to kick off the holiday hiring season since 2012. ...

from David Ruccio For decades now, the labor share of U.S. national income (the blue line measured on the left-hand vertical axis in the chart above) has steadily declined, while the shares of income and wealth captured by the top 1 percent (the red and green lines on the right-hand axis) has increased. And in recent years, even as employment has mostly recovered from the Second Great Depression, the wages paid to the majority of workers have continued to stagnate (even while incomes...

The latest polls showing Clinton would win the presidential election is more evidence to support my argument that trying to predict human behavior  — whether it involves economic decision making or politics decision making — involves dealing with a nonergodic stochastic process. Pollsters believe that if you take a RANDOM SAMPLE OF THE VOTING POPULATION ON DAY X  BEFORE THE ELECTION  and calculate the probability distribution of voting for the various candidates, then this x day before...

Attached is an excellent piece on the euro zone by Professor Andrea Terzi Sales aren’t falling year over year but they aren’t growing at 5% as they would do in ‘normal’ times:In ‘normal’ times inventories increase with sales, adding to output. But when sales slow inventory growth stops and reverses: I like this headline:

I guess it is time to publish this graph, from the USA NASA.gov site. My prediction: this series will soon be discontinued. I did add some text, as grading has tought me that even intelligent people often have difficulties with the interpretation of graphs. My interpretation: the ‘no warming’ meme, which has been quite influential in climate denial circles, is and Always has been bonkers and climate change is progressing faster than expected. But are these deniers really stupid, or bad at...

The Saudis set prices via discounts to benchmarks, which will trigger either price appreciation or depreciation, or, if they happen to get the discounts ‘exactly neutral,’ at least near term stability. They then allow their clients, who are all refiners, to buy all they want at the posted prices. To date the total purchased has been less than their presumed 12 million barrel per day production capacity. the chart shows that the price cut a couple of years ago, from over $100...