Tag Archives: Uncategorized

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,...

from Dean Baker Harvard professor, textbook author, and occasionally New York Times columnist Greg Mankiw told readers today that Donald Trump’s economic team is wrong to worry about the trade deficit. “The most important lesson about trade deficits is that they have a flip side. When the United States buys goods and services from other nations, the money Americans send abroad generally comes back in one way or another. One possibility is that foreigners use it to buy things we produce,...

Brexit, TrumpKKK, the EU – broadly defined labour markets are key. About this: A. Noah Smith is changing his opinion A job is more than a paycheck. It is a social institution, too Debunking labour economics 101 (very clever but also logical and empirical) B. Frances Coppola is not changing her opinion: ‘Reinventing work for the future'(about basic income) C. The Daily Mail wants to change your opinion, about this (graph) Source: ONS. The non-far right should not leave it to the Daily Mail...

from David Ruccio In the second installment of this series on “class before Trumponomics,” I argued that, in recent decades, while American workers have created enormous wealth, most of the increase in that wealth has been captured by their employers and a tiny group at the top—as workers have been forced to compete with one another for new kinds of jobs, with fewer protections, at lower wages, and with less security than they once expected. And the period of recovery from the Second...

Year over year growth continues to decelerate, and wage growth remains critically low. And participation rates further evidence a massive shortage of aggregate demand, and it’s all only getting worse: Highlights Payroll growth is solid and the unemployment rate is down sharply, but not all the indications from the November report employment are favorable. Nonfarm payrolls rose 178,000 in November to just beat out expectations with revisions no factor, as a sharp downward...