Tag Archives: Uncategorized

From George Monbiot in The Guardian: Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them. The failure to get to grips with our crises, by all mainstream political parties, is likely to lead to a war between the major powers in my lifetime Over this time,...

On his insightful ‘conversable economist’ blog the excellent Timothy Taylor has a good piece about European unemployment which as follows: American readers: can you imagine the social turmoil in the US if the unemployment rate has been above 10% for the last seven years, instead of peaking at 10% back in October 2009 and falling down to about 5% by a year ago in fall 2015? Can you imagine if half of these unemployed had been looking for work for more than a year? Consider the difference,...

Revised up a bit as expected, pretty much all from revising up consumer spending. And it’s still a soybean export and inventory building story: Highlights The third quarter has gotten a meaningful upgrade. The second estimate is 3 tenths higher than the first, at a plus 3.2 percent annualized rate and which includes an upgrade for consumer spending and, in further good news, a downgrade in inventory growth. Personal consumption expenditures rose at a 2.8 percent pace in the...

from David Ruccio In the first installment of this series on “class before Trumponomics,” I argued that the recovery from the crash of 2007-08 created conditions that were favorable to capital at the expense of labor—and that trend represented a continuation of the class dynamic that had characterized the U.S. economy for decades, going back at least to the early 1980s. There are, of course, many details that were left out of that story, and I want to present a more fine-grained class...

from Asad Zaman PRELIMINARY REMARKS: Philosopher Hilary Putnam writes in “The Collapse of the Fact/Value Distinction” that there are cases where we can easily and clearly distinguish between facts and values — the objective and the subjective. However, it is wrong to think that we can ALWAYS do so. There are many sentences, especially in economic theories, where the two are “inextricably entangled” . This is the fourth post in a sequence about Re-Reading Keynes. This post is focused on a...

Total Black Friday sales down vs last year:http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-holidayshopping-idUSKBN13L0ZH?il=0 The Trump thing looks to be going to go from bad to worse. I understand that sometimes it makes sense to vote in the village idiot. But then you do have to deal with him being the President. It’s like having an 8 year old loud mouthed spoiled brat boy king without a regent. So my advice is to not get your hopes up too high for anything rational coming out of the...

http://econintersectllc.cmail2.com/t/r-l-yhuudyld-jutdvkyuh-jy/ http://econintersect.com/pages/releases/release.php?post=201611250637&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Global%20Economic%20Intersection%20Newsletter%20Feed&utm_content=Daily%20Global%20Economic%20Intersection%20Newsletter%20Feed+CID_2c6311bc7e868470eee44c0357c5f143&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=Trucking%20Data%20Mixed%20In%20October%202016 Not looking good: ...

Higher trade deficit than expected, and last month revised higher. And just getting going: Highlights The advance international goods deficit widened to $62.0 billion in September from minus $56.5 billion in August. The increase in the deficit was bigger than the anticipated deficit of $59.7 billion. Exports were down 2.7 percent on the month while imports increased 1.1 percent. In August exports increased 0.6 percent while imports declined 1.0 percent. The biggest decline...

Since 1975 workers have received almost none of the gains of increased productivity, which has increased by 143% since around 1975 (figure 14). In other words, productivity has more than doubled, while workers received none of the gains. This can be explained by the deindustrialization of the US economy, as heavy industries followed by manufacturing in general were exported to Asia. Due to this trend there was a huge decrease in unionization which went from 39% in 1940 to around 10% in...

from Asad Zaman This 1000 word article is the third in a series of posts on Re-Reading Keynes. It traces the impact of Keynesian theories on the 20th century, as necessary background knowledge for a contextual and historically situated study of Keynes. It was published in Express Tribune on 4 Nov 2016. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has created awareness of the great gap between academic models and reality. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said that modern DSGE macroeconomic...