Tag Archives: Uncategorized

This is the time of year when year over year growth tends to increase, pulling up the rest of the year’s growth. But note how that increase has declined along with the general increases: Along with what looks to me like Trumped up expectations actual sales remain depressed: Any expected Trump bump in home sales didn’t materialize in contracts for homes signed in November. Higher mortgage rates hit home sales, driving the National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales...

from David Ruccio During the recent presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to revitalize American manufacturing—and bring back “good” manufacturing jobs. So did Hillary Clinton. What neither candidate was willing to acknowledge is that, while manufacturing output was already on the rebound after the Great Recession, the jobs weren’t going to come back. As is clear from the chart above, manufacturing output has grown (by about 21 percent) since the end of the recession and is now...

Apart from the Trumped up future expectations and the sagging retail sales reports, expectations remain elevated: Highlights Consumer confidence shows no sign of slowing. The index is up 12.9 points since the November election in gains driven by older consumers. The level for December is 113.7 which is the highest reading since way back in August 2001. But not all the indications from the December report point to monthly acceleration. December’s gain is centered in...

from Jonathan Nitzan Theories of Military Keynesianism and the Military-Industrial Complex became popular after the Second World War, and perhaps for a good reason. The prospect of military demobilization, particularly in the United States, seemed alarming. The U.S. elite remembered vividly how soaring military spending had pulled the world out of the Great Depression, and it feared that falling military budgets would reverse this process. If that were to happen, the expectation was that...

from Asad Zaman This 7th post in a series about re-reading Keynes, starts the discussion of Chapter 2 of General Theory, which deals with the Classical (and neoclassical) Postulates characterizing the Labor market. The astonishing fact is that Keynes central arguments regarding how the labor market can fail to be at equilibrium, despite flexible wages, were never understood. As a consequence, the theory of the labor market is taught today exactly as it was prior to Keynes, and completely...

The cemetery at Lampedusa were the locals and the drowned immigrants from Africa are buried.

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...