Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The Q3 blip up remains a soybean export, inventory building and healthcare premium story likely to be reversed in q4, as it all continues it’s general deceleration since oil capex peaked a couple of years ago: GDP 3.5% in Q3. The acceleration in real GDP in the third quarter primarily reflected an upturn in private inventory investment, an acceleration in exports, a smaller decrease in state and local government spending, an upturn in federal government spending, and a...

As previously discussed- sales are slowing and inventory is too high: U.S. Car Makers Idle Plants Amid Oversupply Concerns By Mike Colias Adrienne Roberts and Christina Rogers Dec 21 (WSJ) — Detroit auto makers are pulling back on first-quarter production in response to a cooling in retail demand and a shift in consumer tastes, a speed bump for an industry that has laid the foundation for U.S. economic expansion in recent years. All three domestic car companies this week said...

from David Ruccio There are two sides to the recent China Shock literature created by David Autor and David Dorn and surveyed by Noah Smith. On one hand, Autor and Dorn (with a variety of coauthors) have challenged the free-trade nostrums of mainstream economists and economic elites—that everyone benefits from free international trade. Using China as an example, they show that increased trade hurt American workers, increased political polarization, and decreased U.S. corporate...

from Dean Baker While Trump is right to emphasize the need for more and better infrastructure, his program is not the way to address the problem. There is much research showing the benefits of spending on traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges. There are also likely to be large gains from less traditional areas like broadband, where the U.S. ranks poorly among wealthy countries, and improving the quality of public drinking water to avoid more Flint disasters. Ideally, a...

This looks like a large part of the ‘portfolio shifting’ that’s been going on out of a variety of ‘fears’. And it is my suspicion that those who are shifting euro assets to other currencies largely have euro liabilities to fund over time. This means they are getting themselves ‘out of balance’ which is another way to say they have gone ‘short euro’ and at some point will be back to cover: Record Capital Outflows Push Euro Toward Parity With Dollar By Mike Bird Dec 21 (WSJ) —...

Next year we’ll witness the hundreth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Here a link from the Marginal Revolution blog. Below a letter by Pjotr Aleksejevitsj Prpotkin, a leading anarchist and one of the keenest scientific minds of the decades around 1900, to Vladimit Iljitsj Lenin. Note that he wrote this as early as March 1920, note also that at this time a civil war not completely unlike the present turmoil in Syria was raging in Russia. Read especially the last part. From Selected...

This is persistent, strong euro medicine that ‘absorbs’ the portfolio selling that’s been going on for over 2 years. And the lack of inflation and tight fiscal policy tell me it will persist until currencies adjust sufficiently to shift the balance: Euro Area Current Account Eurozone’s current account surplus rose to €32.8 billion in October 2016 from €30.9 billion in the same month a year earlier. The services surplus widened to €8.2 billion (from €2.4 billion a year...

New paperback from WEA BooksNarrative Fixation in Economics by Edward Fullbrook Here are the book’s various Amazon pages: United States $20, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany,  India,  Italy,  Japan,  Mexico,  Spain,  United Kingdom £15 ContentsPreface Chapter 1: The narrative pluralism of physics Chapter 2: Intersubjective reality, intrasubjective theory Chapter 3: Concealed ideology Chapter 4: From the natural to the social Chapter 5: Narrative rationality Chapter 6: What is the...

Oké. I’m a teacher. So, I’m primed and educated to be an arrogant nitpicker. But let’s make the best of a this dire situation and trash the work of Ferdinando Giugliano and Christian Odendahl who defile the language of scientific economics. Which is not just a mistake but a dangerous act which might cause misunderstandings and destructive economic policies. On the website of the Centre for European Reform they state about Italy: “But Italy mostly has itself to blame. The abysmal...

from David Ruccio Where does all the surplus in the U.S. economy go? Well, a large chunk of it is captured by the top 1 percent, whose share of national income almost doubled between 1970 and 2014—from 11 percent to 20.2 percent. Equally interesting is the composition of that growing share of national income, which we can decompose thanks to new data from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. One way of making sense of the way the top 1 percent manages to capture a...