Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503) Reason: Exceeded the maximum number of page requests per minute for humans. Important note for site admins: If you are the administrator of this website note that your access has been limited because you broke one of the Wordfence blocking rules. The reason your access was limited is: "Exceeded the maximum number of page requests per...

Why, oh why is there not an effective opposition party in the U.S. Congress? The last time “voter fraud” was as high on the GOP’s agenda as it now is on Trump’s, it led to the politically-motivated firing of nine U.S. Attorneys, which caused a scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. During the Congressional investigation into the firings, it was revealed that millions of emails were missing, some of which were germane to the...

Yes, he said it. One of the gems found by Erwan Mahé in the minutes of the FOMC meetings. Ben Bernanke: “Here we potentially have a comparison to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace and the Versailles treaty, where he pointed out that forcing Germany into extreme austerity, although it might satisfy certain moral, ethical, or political urges, had macroeconomic consequences that might force Germany eventually to rebel. By the same token, if there’s not growth for the South,...

And without the undesired inventory build due to lower sales, it would have only been up .9% for q4, and .25% lower year over year. Personal Consumption (which includes health insurance premiums) has gone from +q2;s 4.3 to q3’s +3.0 to q4’s +2.5 and we’ve kicked off the new year with a big drop in vehicle sales and a big drop in housing starts, etc: Highlights A perhaps unwanted build in inventories drove up fourth-quarter GDP which, however, could only manage 1.9 percent...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

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...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

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...