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from Norbert Häring Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the omnipresent US-consulting company, and Google, the global data miner, issued a joint report in July 2016 on the “$500 bn Pot of Gold”, which is the Indian digital payment market. Even though the authors deny it, the report gives much reason to suspect that the authors knew that something radical was imminent from the Indian government. The report is remarkably honest about the aims of the whole exercise. There is no statement in the...

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from David Ruccio In discussing the textbook treatment of the minimum wage, James Kwak provides a perfect example of how contemporary mainstream economics “can be more misleading than it is helpful.” Kwak refers to the problem as “economism.”* For me, borrowing from a different tradition, it is a case of “vulgar economics.”   The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to...

Big miss here. As previously discussed, it’s a case of lenders raising rates due to Fed fears when demand is low, further reducing demand: Highlights Consistently volatile is the well deserved reputation of the new home sales report. December sales of single-family homes plunged 10.4 percent in the month to a far lower-than-expected annualized rate of only 536,000. In a small offset, the prior two months have been revised upward by a combined 14,000 (to 598,000 for November...

from Peter Radford Already the Trump regime is taking shape. Or, rather, I ought say the agenda is taking shape since the cabinet that is supposed to be overseeing things is well behind schedule in arriving on station. First things first. Trump raised to cost of applying for a mortgage for low income people. He undid a recent reduction in the fees charged by the FHA. That reduction had been put in place because the FHA has a large surplus and wanted to pass along that prosperity to...

“We’re gonna launch an investigation to find out. And then the next time, and I will say this: Of those votes cast, none of ‘em come to me, none of ‘em come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of ‘em come to me. But when you look at the people that are registered: dead, illegal and in two states, and in some cases maybe three states. We have a lot to look into.” — Donald J. Trump I regret to inform you that the nincompoop quoted above is President of...

Looks like a weak start for 2017: From WardsAuto: Forecast: January Forecast Calls for Low Sales, High Inventory The U.S. automotive industry is expected to a have a slow start in the new year, with January light-vehicle sales down 4.4% from like-2016. … The resulting seasonally adjusted annual rate is 17.0 million units, well below the 18.3 million in the previous month and 17.4 million year-ago.…December inventory was 9.2% above same-month 2015, the biggest year-over-year...

Note the trend: Don Schlagenhauf, chief economist for the St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability, and Lowell Ricketts, the Center’s senior analyst, analyzed consumer credit data and found that a decline in housing-related debt offset growth in other types of consumer debt during the third quarter. “The latest data suggest that overall growth may have stalled, despite robust student and auto loan borrowing,” Schlagenhauf and Ricketts wrote. ...

Spencer England | January 25, 2017 8:24 am President Trump is not alone in blaming NAFTA for the decline in US manufacturing employment over the last several decades.  Many people on all sides of the political spectrum believe the same thing.  But as this chart demonstrates the economic data tells a very different story. In the decade after...

As far as I’m concerned, the ECB does not yet have to increase interest rates – as households still have to be able to refinance many billions high rate loans. As mister Draghi has shown, using sectoral balances, households have, unlike companies and governments not yet profited from low rates and QE! Individual EU countries have to reign in the housing market, though. Below, I’ll share some thoughts about this (as I’m a member of the ECB shadow council who gives advice on this, and I am...