Tag Archives: Uncategorized

from David Ruccio Right now, after Donald’s Trump surprising victory and in the midst of the messy transition, everyone is curious about how the U.S. economy will change if and when the president-elect’s economic policies are enacted.* But first things first. We need to have a clear understanding of what the U.S. economy looks like now, during the uneven recovery from the Second Great Depression. In particular, it’s important to analyze the class dimensions of that recovery, even before...

Image from Jeff Djevdet – Flickr It will take Big Money to steer Britain through this rocky period. Instead, Chancellor Hammond has promised to continue slashing the very departmental expenditure essential to smooth the path. We must conclude that he does not wish to invest in a safe Brexit at all. We live in perilous times. The demand by millions of people for protection from austerity and globalisation has fuelled support for extreme right-wing parties across the world. The possible...

from Dean Baker Donald Trump has basically come right out said that he intends to use the presidency to further enrich himself and his family. After refusing to follow long-established precedent and put his assets in a blind trust, he proclaimed, “the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Of course the president absolutely can have a conflict of interest as speakers of the English language use the expression. If a president owns a large business empire, as does Mr. Trump, there...

Notable only in that analysts are calling the latest 1% increase ‘strong growth’… First a big move down, now a rush to get in ahead of fed rate hikes. But still remains depressed by historical standards: Highlights Rising interest rates are causing some volatility in mortgage activity, with purchase applications for home mortgages increasing by an outsized, seasonally adjusted 19 percent in the November 18 week after falling 6 percent in the prior week, while refinancing...

These sales are reported based on actual closings, and they look to have flattened around the 5.5 million/yr rate. But that was before lenders hiked mortgage rates due to Trumpenomics frears, and mortgage purchase apps did drop a full 6% last week. And this number is not ‘population adjusted’: Talk about cheerleading- the order book remains in contraction: UK Factory Orders Rise in November: CBI The Confederation of British Industry order book balance rose to -3 in November...

from David Ruccio Yes, the late Richard Rorty got it spot on: Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point,...

from Asad Zaman The first post on Reading Keynes provided an outline of the reasons why this is a good idea. It is clear that economics is broken. We need a new macroeconomics for the 21st century, one which can solve the massive problems which humanity as a whole is facing on political, social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Keynes faced similar problems, and found solutions which guided economic policy in the mid twentieth century. It is always useful to absorb the insights of...

A new paper by Joseph Stiglitz (it might be that he has been holding these ‘heterodox’ (better: common sense) views for some time already): In the aftermath of the Great Recession, there is a growing consensus, even among central bank officials, concerning the limitations of monetary policy. This paper provides an explanation for the ineffectiveness of monetary policy, and in doing so provides a new framework for thinking about monetary policy and macro-economic activity. What matters is...

Still in the red: This is not a good sign for global demand. And Japan’s continuing trade surplus recently enhanced by the falling yen isn’t a positive for US GDP: Japan’s trade surplus grows 4.7-fold in October Nov 21 (Kyodo) — Japan’s trade surplus expanded 4.7-fold in October from a year earlier to 496.17 billion yen ($4.5 billion). The value of exports dropped 10.3 percent from a year earlier to 5.87 trillion yen while imports plunged 16.5 percent to 5.37 trillion yen....

from Asad Zaman I am planning a sequence of posts on re-reading Keynes, where I will try to go through the General Theory. This first post explains my motivations for re-reading Keynes. As always, my primary motive is self-education; this will force me to go through the book again — I first read it in my first year graduate course on Macroeconomics at Stanford in 1975, when our teacher Duncan Foley was having doubts about modern macro theories, and decided to go back to the original...