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October 5th, 2016 Ann Pettifor recently travelled to New Zealand at the invitation of Professor Ian Shirley of The Policy Observatory  and Vice Chancellor Derek McCormack at Auckland University of Technology, and also Mike Smith of the New Zealand Fabian Society. She spent 10 days delivering public lectures on economics in Wellington and Auckland. In one of her media interviews Ann spoke to the formidable and highly regarded Kathryn Ryan, host of Nine to Noon on Radio NZ about the...

The potential future costs of financial fragility and asset price bubbles raise the prospect of policy whiplash effects due to contradictions between current and future policy actions. The economy currently suffers from shortage of AD owing to systemic failings related to income inequality and trade deficit leakages. That demand shortage was papered over by a thirty-year credit bubble plus successive asset price bubbles, which eventually burst with the financial crisis of 2008. Now,...

Negative interest rates or 100% reserves: alchemy vs chemistry Herman Daly   [University of Maryland, USA] The close connection of fractional reserve banking with alchemy was recently emphasized by Mervyn King, former head of the Bank of England, in the very title of his recent book, The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Failure of the Global Economy. He refers to the more thorough development of this connection by Swiss ecological economist H. C. Binswanger in his brilliant study,...

Based on a preliminary estimate from WardsAuto, light vehicle sales were at a 17.65 million SAAR in September. That is down about 2% from September 2015, and up 4.3% from the 16.92 million annual sales rate last month. Read more at http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/#ycdZ4cVpGQLvjHoI.99 Manhattan apartment sales plunge 19 percent By Robert Frank ISM New York Report On Business September 2016 ISM New York 49.6 in September. New York City business activity largely held...

from David Ruccio While Wells Fargo (whose CEO blamed employees for his bank’s failings) has put traditional banks in the news lately, the resurgence of the so-called shadow banking sector has largely gone unnoticed. Until now. The Dallas Fed (pdf) has issued an alarming report concerning the growth of financial activities that, while connected to traditional banks, remains largely unregulated—even under Dodd-Frank. “Shadow banking,” an almost sinister-sounding term that originated in...

Worse than expected, prior month revised lower, and year over year now in contraction as the downtrend continues. Watch for further downward q3 GDP revisions: Highlights Multi-family units are just about the only strength in what is a weak construction spending report for August, down 0.7 percent on the month with July revised 3 tenths lower and into the negative column at minus 0.3 percent. Construction spending on new single-family homes fell 0.9 percent for the third...

For a group that has helped change the way economics is taught at universities up and down Britain, the Post-Crash Economics Society had a less than momentous start. It was November 2012 when seven undergraduates met in a cramped room on the top floor of Manchester university’s student union. Chairs drawn into a semi-circle, they listened as the two founding members went through a brief PowerPoint presentation explaining what they thought was wrong with the economics curriculum. A polite...

Big move down into contraction as the trend continues:This downtrend is intact as well: Flattened out as oil capex collapsed, and well below levels of prior cycl:

The consumer isn’t ‘coming back’ until after deficit spending, public or private, increases to offset unspent income, and ‘putting money into savings’ (below) is better described as ‘increasing borrowing less’. Also, consumption spending includes health care premiums and utility bills, and when they go up it tends to later take away from spending on other things: Highlights August was a soft month for the consumer, both for income and especially for spending. Income rose only...

Stamps are money. And as such often adorned with the heads of presidents. A sign of the times: nowadays also with the heads of super models (Anton Corbijn meets Doutzen Kroes edition, both live up to their reputation). The core neoliberal value: companies and markets first, families second. Which explains the absence of involuntary unemployment from neoclassical macro models. But this value is also bad for the health of young children The core free choice value of western society (maybe...