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Trade deficit moving back out. I expect a lot more to come this quarter and next. Oil is getting more expensive and the quantity imported is up as well. The ‘one time’ soybean export bulge is behind us, and global trade in general has slowed. Wouldn’t surprise me if Trump responds by having the US start buying foreign currencies, which would send the dollar lower to offset ‘foreign currency manipulation’. And, of course, he’d show a ‘profit’ in fx purchases as the dollar...

from Dean Baker During the campaign Donald Trump boasted that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t affect his standing among his supporters. Whether or not this is true, this appears to be the approach that Trump and his fellow Republicans are taking to their role in governing. The basic story is that they can rip off the public as much as they want, because ain’t no one going to stop them. They could be right. The most immediate issue is Trump’s refusal to sell his...

from C. P. Chandrasekhar In today’s troubled times, mega-mergers are the norm. Announcements of marriages like that between AB Inbev and SABMiller in the beer industry or Bayer and Monsanto in the agribusiness sector attract attention that soon fades, even as the difficult task of getting clearances from the regulators continues. But the just announced agreement to merge by AT&T and Time Warner, in a $85 billion deal, is likely to remain in public discussion for some time. If it does...

What Does Modern Money Theory Tell us About Demonetisation? Dec 5 (The Wire) — Warren Mosler, a founder of MMT, explains the idea of “taxes drive money” using a simple example. He pulls out his visiting card in a classroom and … Continuous flow of this stuff:Donald Trump insults China with Taiwan phone call and tweets on trade, South China Sea PR No. 298 PM TELEPHONES PRESIDENT-ELECT USA Islamabad: November 30, 2016 Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif called...

Post election surveys may prove to be a bit ‘trumped up’, just saying… Highlights In another sign of strength for the economy, the ISM non-manufacturing index jumped 2.4 points in November to a 57.2 reading that tops Econoday’s high-end forecast. Employment for ISM’s sample, where growth was soft in October, shot more than 5 points higher to an outsized 58.2. Averaging recent scores for this reading puts the trend at a softer but still very respectable mid-50s rate. New...

from David Ruccio The total income reported on the top 400 individual tax returns rose 20 percent in 2014, according to Internal Revenue Service (pdf) data released last Thursday.   The figures reveal the concentration of earnings at the summit of the income distribution, in a club that required $126.8 million of adjusted gross income to enter. That tiny group, out of nearly 150 million tax returns in 2014, took home $175.5 million on average (that’s in 1990 dollars) and 1.3 percent of...

from Asad Zaman Fifth Post in a sequence on Re-Reading Keynes. Chapter 1 of General Theory is just one paragraph, displayed in full HERE Briefly: Keynes writes that Classical Economics is a special case of his General Theory. Furthermore, the assumptions required for the special case do not hold for contemporary economic societies,”with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience” The discussion below borrows...

This line shows total GDP growth over the prior 10 years. It makes the point as to just how sudden the latest drop off was and how severe it continues to be. It’s just screaming ‘lack of aggregate demand’ begging a fiscal relaxation of maybe 5% of GDP annually for a while. Bottom line: It’s always an unspent income story. The 2008 financial crisis led to a sharp fall off in private sector deficit spending (credit expansion) that had been offsetting desires to not spend...

He plans a 35% tariff on goods manufactured by American firms abroad: The U.S. is going to substantialy reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016 fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. …… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016 without retribution or consequence,...