Down from the post-Covid bounce but not in any kind of collapse: More evidence we had a soft landing, cushioned by the rate hikes that supported personal income. And no sign the rate hikes have slowed lending. If anything looks like they support it: Back to pre-Covid levels of GDP growth:
Read More »Flirting with Armageddon: the US and Ukraine
It is now almost six months since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with each passing month the Biden administration has ratcheted up US participation in the conflict. That ratchet process has the US flirting ever closer with nuclear Armageddon, a momentous development that has gone almost uncommented and uncontested. It is as […]
Read More »Open thread August 12, 2022
Dumb and Dumber — the Chicago economics version
from Lars Syll Some years ago, in a lecture on the US recession, Robert Lucas gave an outline of what the New Classical school of macroeconomics today thinks on the latest downturns in the US economy and its future prospects. Lucas shows that real US GDP has grown at an average yearly rate of 3 per cent since 1870, with one big dip during the Depression of the 1930s and a big — but more minor — dip in the recent recession. After stating his view that the US recession that started in 2008...
Read More »CPI, PPI
As previously discussed, with oil prices coming down the inflation problem ends. (The month to month change in CPI was 0) And what happens next depends on what oil prices do next. I suspect they go a lot higher as Saudi OSPs remain elevated and speculative long positions taken on when the war in Ukraine started seem to have been sold in anticipation of recession. And while refining margins are down from the highs, they remain elevated, indicating refiners, the only buyers of...
Read More »Who’s holding back electric cars in Australia?
We’ve long known the answer – and it’s time to clear the road My latest piece in The Conversation Share this:Like this:Like Loading...
Read More »A coherent alternative has to be proposed
from Nikolaos Karagiannis and Issue 94 RWER The practical use of the term “neoliberal” exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008 financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle. The second was economic hyper-globalization, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to new, more ambitious types of trade agreements. Financialization and hyper-globalization have...
Read More »Hat trick! My newsletter for August
From my Substack Share this:Like this:Like Loading...
Read More »Open thread August 9, 2022
Yanis Varoufakis on the irrelevance of mainstream economics
from Lars Syll [embedded content] Varoufakis is undoubtedly right — there is indeed something about the way mainstream economists construct their models that obviously doesn’t sit right. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics would give way to...
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