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Continues to decline. One less reason for the Fed to hike today… Highlights Rising interest rates continue to take their toll on mortgage activity, with purchase applications for home mortgages falling a seasonally adjusted 3.0 percent in the December 9 week, while refinancing applications fell 4.0 percent. The purchase index now stands just 2 percent above its reading a year ago, a 1 percentage point decline from the prior week. Reaching the highest level since October...

ht graph: @lugaricano The IMF is totally right: the EU is mistreating Greece – and the EU knows. The IMF is also right about this: Greece is – even within its budgetary confines – also mistreating its poor as too much money is flowing to the rich (graph). From the IMF website: The IMF is not demanding more austerity. On the contrary, when the Greek Government agreed with its European partners in the context of the ESM program to push the Greek economy to a primary fiscal surplus of 3.5...

real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA – Subscribers: 26,498       subscribe      RWER Blog     ISSN 1755-9472– A journal of the World Economics Association (WEA)  14,588 members, join         – Sister open access journals:  Economic Thought   and    World Economic Review     back issues Issue no. 77  10 December 2016download the whole issue Human growth and avoiding European disintegration: lessons from Polanyi          2Jorge Buzaglo         ...

Nice Trumped up spike, led entirely by expectations the new President would make everything better, but even with that low by historical standards: Highlights The small business optimism index rose a sharp 3.5 points in November to 98.4, significantly exceeding expectations and posting the highest reading since May 2015. The NFIB said small business optimism remained flat leading up to Election day, but then rocketed higher, ignited by business owners’ expectations of better...

from David Ruccio Certainly not by mainstream economists—not if they continue to defend their turf and to attack the new literature on “Slavery’s Capitalism” with the vehemence they’ve recently displayed. It makes me want to forget I ever obtained my Ph.D. in economics and the fact that I’ve spent much of my life working in and around the discipline. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education [ht: ja] highlights Edward E. Baptist’s novel book, The Half Has Never Been Told...

At this point in time higher oil prices are an unambiguous negative for the US economy. The higher prices will drain low income consumer $, and while incomes for higher end consumers with oil related income will benefit, I don’t see them increasing spending as fast as the low end cuts back. Also, with the US importing more oil and at higher prices, incomes of foreign oil producers will benefit but, again, I don’t see them buying as many more US goods and services. And oil...

from Asad Zaman This post, 6th in a sequence about Re-Reading Keynes, continues to borrow heavily from Brian S. Ferguson, “Lectures on John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1): Chapter One, Background and Historical Setting” University of Guelph Department of Economics and Finance Discussion Paper No. 2013-06. However the first three paragraphs are mine. Distinguishing between ideologies and science: Deduction: According to Lionel Robbins, economic theory...

The new quarterly  Irish GDP statistics are in. They are, again, bewildering. Ireland grows because investments are down…. I’ll explain. On the one hand we read: ‘Overall total domestic demand declined by 1.8% in Q3 2016 compared with Q2 2016.’. This decline was led by a 17,8% decline in investments. On the other hand we read: “The National Accounts results show an increase of 4.0% in GDP and an increase of 3.2% in GNP in Q3 2016 compared with Q2 2016“ A heft growth of GDP in combination...

from Dean Baker Paul Krugman told readers that intellectual types like him tend to vote for progressive taxes and other measures that benefit white working class people. This is only partly true. People with college and advanced degrees tend to be strong supporters of recent trade deals [I’m including China’s entry to the WTO] that have been a major factor in the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last quarter century, putting downward pressure on the pay of workers without college...

from David Ruccio Income inequality continues to grow in the United States—which represents the very definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”   According to recent data by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, from 1979 through 2006, the share of pre-tax income going to the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households fell from an already-low 20.1 percent to an even-lower 13.5 percent. During that same period, the top 1...