Tag Archives: Uncategorized

The beatings will continue until morale improves… The Collapse of Rome: Washington’s $6.5 trillion Black Hole The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the agency that provides finance and accounting services for the Pentagon’s civilian and military members, has just revealed that it cannot provide adequate documentation for $6.5 trillion worth of “adjustments” to Army general fund transactions and data. According to a report released July 26 by the by the Inspector General...

Still extremely depressed:Down and well below expectations: HighlightsWeakness in orders and employment were unfortunate themes of last week’s Empire State and Philly Fed reports and likewise headline the manufacturing PMI report. The PMI, which is based on a nationwide sample of manufacturers, slowed by 8 tenths in the August flash to 52.1, a reading only modestly above breakeven 50 to indicate no more than limited expansion in composite activity. Output is the month’s best...

from Peter Radford One of the major reasons, perhaps the major reason, economics is oftentimes irrelevant to our understanding of economies is that it fails to notice a rather salient fact: economies have no end. They have no beginning either. Or, rather, the choice of an ending or a beginning are merely arbitrary selections by an analyst needing to close up the system for analytical purposes. But this act of closure destroys the validity of any results from the subsequent analysis. Why?...

How are the EU and the Euro Area doing? some graphs about the labour force. Main points: Very fast employment and labour force growth in Germany during the last year (‘despite’ the new the minimum wage in many sectors). The labour force is increase is not just about refugees but to quite an extent about non-German inhabitants of the EU. Mind the employment decline after the Harz reform’ around 2001. I’m not sure if the fast increase also shows in the data of the Statistisches Bundesamt.A...

Stephanie Kelton #1, Pavlina Tcherneva #4!http://theweek.com/articles/643874/hillary-clintons-economic-dream-team Up a bit for the month, but the 3 month moving average remains negative:

from Maria Alejandra Madi The Call for papers for the current conference Food and Justice is now open. We invite you to submit a paper to [email protected] by 15th  September, 2016.  A paperback, Food and Justice, of conference papers will be published by WEA Books in the new year. Visit the Conference website http://foodandjustice2016.weaconferences.net/ Food production has always been present in the economic debate because of the concern about population growth and demographic...

Accelerated with the shale boom, still decelerating with the shale bust: Problem is incentives to not spend income, as below, reduce sales, output, and employment. That is, they’ve got it backwards if the goal is increased GDP etc. Japan mulls longer-term tax break for savers Aug 18 (Nikkei) — The Japanese government plans to offer a new option for tax-free investment accounts featuring a much longer exemption. More than 10 million of the so-called NISA accounts were opened...

from David Ruccio Everyone has read or heard the story: the labor market has rebounded and workers, finally, are “getting a little bigger piece of the pie” (according to President Obama, back in June). And that’s the way it looked—until the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its data. What was originally reported as a 4.2 percent increase in the first quarter of 2016 now seems to be a 0.4 decline (a difference of 4.6 percentage points, in the wrong direction). What’s more, real hourly...

Still looks to me like this is perhaps the most misunderstood statistic, as analysts believe it is signaling strength in the labor markets. Instead I’m suggesting claims are extraordinarily low because the unemployment benefits have become much harder to get: Even with a much higher population and labor force, and with a higher unemployment rate,new claims are at 40 year lows: Not at all good: HighlightsOnce again the Philly Fed’s headline tells an entirely different story...

from Dean Baker Donald Trump seems to have driven a substantial portion of the media into a frenzy with his anti-trade rhetoric. While much of what Trump says is wrong, and his solutions are at best ill-defined, the response in the press has largely been dishonest. For example, a New York Times editorial tried to imply that there was an ambiguous relationship between the size of the trade deficit and employment in manufacturing. It pointed out that Japan and Germany, both countries with...