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Still back to the lower, pre mini spike levels. Industrial production was up due to elevated utility bills, which might explain why retail sales are low: Highlights Same-store sales growth continued the glacial pace of the prior week and was up just 0.3 percent year-on-year in the January 21 week, a sharp deacceleration from the 2-percent plus growth seen in the final weeks of December. Versus December, month-to-date January sales were down 3.5 percent, more than twice the...

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from David Ruccio The American Dream has all but collapsed under the weight of growing inequality. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for the American working-class to sustain a decent standard of living, and their children are increasingly unlikely to be better off than they are. But those who hang on to the American Dream—or at least the selling of that dream to others—believe that sending young people to the nation’s colleges and universities is the solution.  The problem, of...

Recently I put up a few graphs showing that the income of immigrants is correlated with the income of the country from which they hailed, and that this relationship is especially true for immigrants who have been in the US the longest Garrett Jones has been covering the same ground, and here he provides a bit of a review of the literature: Recently, a small group of economists have found more systematic evidence on how the past predicts the present. Overall, they...

Thomas Palley A negative interest rate policy (NIRP) appears revolutionary, but its justification rests on failed, pre-Keynesian “classical” economics. This claims that lower interest rates can always solve aggregate demand shortages and lead to full employment. Keynes discredited classical economics by showing that saving and investment might not respond, as assumed, to lower interest rates. Once all profitable investment opportunities have been undertaken, negative interest rates may...

From the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC): Apartment Markets Soften in the January NMHC Quarterly Survey — Apartment markets continued to retreat in the January National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) Quarterly Survey of Apartment Market Conditions. All four indexes of Market Tightness (25), Sales Volume (25), Equity Financing (33) and Debt Financing (14) remained below the breakeven level of 50 for the second quarter in a row. “Weaker conditions are evident...

This is very ‘strong euro’ stuff, as in the longer term trade flows do rule: Euro Area Current Account Surplus At Nearly 1-Year High Eurozone current account surplus rose to EUR 40.5 billion in November of 2016 from a EUR 30.9 billion surplus a year earlier and reaching the highest since December of 2015. Considering the first eleven months of the year, the current account surplus rose by EUR 38.4 billion to EUR 355.8 billion; the goods surplus increased to EUR 372.6 billion...

from Norbert Häring The European Ombudswoman has announced that she will investigate the membership of the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, in the Group of Thirty. this is a shadowy forum of the most senior executives from large commercial banks and the most important central banks.The Group of Thirty meets behind closed doors without the press and without minutes taken. Some of the institutions are being supervised by the ECB. This group could come to an end,...

When Barack Obama became President, Republicans in Congress pledged to oppose him tooth and nail. That was a bad idea. It implied that they were hoping the President would fail. This implies one of two things: either they wished ill for the country, or they were completely convinced that Obama was wrong and they were right on every important issue. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, we can assume hubris rather than dislike of country (or worse). But hubris...

from Maria Alejandra Madi Much of the comments on the global financial and economic crisis have focused on the proximate causes and governance issues related to risk management, monetary policy and weak regulation. New political alignments allowed a process of global financial deregulations in the early 1970s. The political ascendancy of financial capital and extensive capital market liberalization, employment goals were abandoned in the economic policy agenda. Indeed,   price...