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from Peter Söderbaum Book review of Offer, Avner and Gabriel Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy and the Market Turn, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2016. Since 1969 there has been a so called Nobel Economics Prize. It is not a normal Nobel Prize established by Alfred Nobel but rather a prize reminding us of the 300 year existence of the Central Bank in Sweden. The correct name is “The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred...

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from Peter Radford Here we are one day before the ascension of Trump to the White House and already the policy chaos has begun. To be fair to Trump this particular chaos is not necessarily of his own doing entirely. The Republicans in Congress are also responsible. So hell bent are they in expunging all things Obama from the record that they have charged into the valley of death known as health care reform. Or, in this case, un-reform. Having spent vast amounts of hours and taxpayer money...

Sandwichman | January 20, 2017 1:18 am Dave Moss: What’s your name?  Blake: Fuck you. That’s my name. You know why, mister? ‘Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. THAT’s my name. Long before Alec Baldwin did his Saturday Night Live impression of Donald J. Trump, Trump appropriated Baldwin’s sadistic...

from Lars Syll A rigorous application of econometric methods in economics presupposes that the phenomena of our real world economies are ruled by stable causal relations between variables. Parameter-values estimated in specific spatio-temporal contexts are presupposed to be exportable to totally different contexts. To warrant this assumption one, however, has to convincingly establish that the targeted acting causes are stable and invariant so that they maintain their parametric status...

from Asad Zaman This is the 9th Post in a sequence about Re-Reading Keynes. In chapter 2 of General Theory, Keynes wishes to develop a theory of employment. He claims that classical economics does not have a theory of employment, because it assumes that all resources will be fully employed. But the theory that unemployment will always be 0% – except for frictional – is not a theory which can explain observations of high and persistent unemployment. Taking this post-Depression observation...

As previously discussed, no homes are built without prior permits, which are going nowhere: Highlights Housing starts extended their wild ride of volatility in December, up 11.3 percent in the month to a 1.226 million annualized rate which beats the Econoday consensus for 1.200 million. But the rise is confined to multi-unit starts which jumped 57 percent to a 431,000 rate, a contrast to the 4.0 percent decline to 795,000 for single-family starts. Permits, which are subject...

from David Ruccio Oxfam’s headline-grabbing numbers are bad enough: “Eight men are as rich as half the world.” But the international organization has presented an even more serious and severe indictment of current economic arrangements—which can’t be glossed over by merely encouraging those at the top to pay more taxes. In the background paper, “An Economy for the 99 Percent” (a follow-up to last year’s “An Economy for the 1%“), Oxfam researchers both document the existence of grotesque...

Back down again, in spite of Trumped up expectations, and going nowhere: Highlights Purchase applications for home mortgages fell a seasonally adjusted 5.0 percent in the January 13 week, while applications for refinancing rose 7 percent. Unadjusted, the purchase index increased 25 percent compared to the previous week, however, taking the year-on-year comparison up 17 percentage points from the prior week to minus 1 percent, a strong recovery but still sharply below the...

from  Norbert Haering In a news piece on rediff, one of India’s most popular news-sites, Badal Malick, CEO of the US-Indian organization Catalyst, explains via a friendly journalist, what Catalyst is doing and that my writing on Catalyst and on Washington’s meddling in the fight against cash in India was bogus. He did not convince me. Maybe he will convince you. To very briefly summarize my piece “‘A Well-Kept Open Secret: Washington Is Behind India’s Brutal Demonetisation Project‘”(...