Tag Archives: Uncategorized

At this very moment (9 september 2016), arctic sea ice may have reached its yearly minimum extent. Does global warming cause a decline of this minimum? Business cycle economists use the phrase ‘months for cyclical dominance’: how many months does it take before trend movements are larger than monthly fluctuations of variables like consumption of exports? In the case of sea ice I used ‘years for cyclical dominance (YCD)’: a fourteen year moving average shows a continuous decline (the max....

from Dean Baker While Elizabeth Warren is praising the European Union’s crackdown on Apple’s Ireland tax scheme, Jack Lew and the Obama Treasury Department are going to bat for corporate tax cheating. Warren is far too optimistic about the prospect of a successful crackdown. These folks are prepared to spend a lot of money to hide their profits from tax authorities and they are likely to find accomplices in many Irelands around the world. It would be good to look in a different direction....

from David Ruccio I have been arguing for some time on this blog that contemporary capitalism faces a profound legitimation crisis. It has failed to deliver on its promises, and therefore is being calling into question. As it turns out, Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, has also sounded a warning about the ongoing legitimacy crisis. But for him it’s a bit different. The problem, as he sees it, is the tension between democracy and capitalism. A natural...

Interesting how it peaked as oil capex collapsed;) Highlights Information revenue fell 0.1 percent in the second quarter compared to the first quarter. Information revenue in the first quarter is revised 1 tenth higher to plus 1.4 percent. Year-on-year, information revenue rose 3.8 percent in the second quarter vs an unrevised 5.7 percent gain in the first quarter. This is the beginning of the ‘revisions’ previously discussed. The govt. estimates jobs created by net new...

Look at how many more new applications there used to be when rates were double where they are now: Just an fyi, his logic makes no sense to me whatsoever: Fed’s Williams says U.S. economy in good shape, wants rate hike (Reuters) It “makes sense to get back to a pace of gradual rate increases, preferably sooner rather than later,” San Francisco Fed President John Williams said. Targeting low inflation, as the Fed and many other central banks currently do, simply will not work...

From: Erwan Mahé ‘Mr Draghi may have laid a fairly sophisticated trap to ensnare his most reticent colleagues.’. In a happy coincidence, the Fed and BoJ will hold their monetary policy meetings on exactly the same days, the 20th and 21st of September, with enough uncertainty in their decisions to reignite implied volatility in the preceding days! But we should, above all, focus on the ECB meeting, tomorrow, with speculation rampant about the possible changes Mr Draghi may announce in the...

from David Ruccio I have argued many times over the years that mainstream economists, especially mainstream macroeconomists, largely ignore the issue of inequality. And when they do see it, they tend to misunderstand both its causes (often attributing it to exogenous events, such as globalization and technical change) and its consequences (often failing to connect it, other than through “political capture,” to events like the crash of 2007-08). In my view, mainstream economists overlook...

Looks like the Saudis want prices to be a bit firmer: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-04/saudi-arabia-raises-pricing-for-october-crude-to-asia-on-demand Rail Week Ending 27 August 2016: All Rolling Averages Worsen And Remain In Contraction Sept 2 (Econointerest) — Week 34 of 2016 shows same week total rail traffic (from same week one year ago) contracted according to the Association of American Railroads (AAR) traffic data. This week, all rolling averages’...

from Asad Zaman The IMF has been among the principal architects, executors and enforcers of the neoliberal agenda all over the globe for several decades. This is why an IMF publication with an article entitled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is as surprising as an ISIS article entitled “Violence: Oversold?” would be. Has neoliberalism become so unpopular that even the IMF does not want to be associated with it? In this essay, we study the lessons that the IMF claims to have learnt from...

from Steve Keen In my last post on my Debtwatch blog, I finished by saying that the Physiocrats were the only School of economics to properly consider the role of energy in production. They ascribed it solely to agriculture exploiting the free energy of the Sun, and specifically to land, which absorbed this free energy and stored it in agricultural products. As Richard Cantillon put it in 1730: The Land is the Source or Matter from whence all Wealth is produced. The Labour of man is the...