Tag Archives: Uncategorized

No recession yet: Income and consumption not yet indicating recession:

from Dean Baker The Inflation Reduction Act includes a remarkable innovation. Share buybacks will be taxed at a 1% rate. This is a huge deal, not only because it taxes money that was often escaping taxation at the individual level, but it is a move away from basing the corporate income tax on profits, which can be easily manipulated, to taxing returns to shareholders. It is time for a major and simple overhaul of the corporate income tax system. The main problem with the current system is...

from Peter Radford Taking a short break from my crusade to get information taken more seriously in economics … Yesterday’s Financial Times includes, on page 9 of the print edition, one of its regular “Market Insights” columns.  This is the space the FT allocates to sundry financial market types to opine on subjects of general interest to other financial market types.  It’s always a good read if you want to gain insight into how our magnificent financiers talk to themselves whilst...

Back to slow growth: At least so far, the post-Covid spike has been nearly reversed. We’ll see where it goes from here: Post-Covid bounce reversed, still above 50 which signals modest growth:

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece in defence of presentism, discovering just before I posted, that the same title had been used (also this year) by David Armitage, Professor of History at Harvard. It was good to know that I wasn’t alone, but as Armitage made clear, “presentism” has been “a term of abuse conventionally deployed to describe an interpretation of history that is biased towards and coloured by present-day concerns, preoccupations and values”. A fairly standard version...

from Lars Syll The model is not . . . how one determines the soundness or otherwise of a mathematical proof; it is, rather, how one determines the reasonableness or otherwise of entries in a crossword puzzle. . . . The crossword model permits pervasive mutual support, rather than, like the model of a mathematical proof, encouraging an essentially one-directional conception. . . . How reasonable one’s confidence is that a certain entry in a crossword is correct depends on: how much support...

This paper explores dollar hegemony, emphasizing it is a fundamentally political economic phenomenon. Dollar hegemony rests on the economic, military, and international political power of the US and is manifested through market forces. The paper argues there have been two eras of dollar hegemony which were marked by different models. Dollar hegemony 1.0 corresponded to […]

The latest from my Substack Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

from Dean Baker With the United States data we have seen from the last few months, it’s fair to say that no one has a very good idea of where the economy is. At the most basic level, we have seen seven months of incredibly rapid job creation this year; the economy added 3.3 million jobs through July, along with two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We don’t have to join the Trumpers in calling this a recession, to be bothered by seeing two main economic indicators going in...