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from Peter Radford re-visiting economics’ basic concepts I am nothing if not annoying.  Allow me to elaborate. Let’s be basic. I mean really really basic. Our model world initially consists of two people, Adam and Eve.  I know, it’s been done before.  But we are economists.  What are we interested in?  What problems that Adam and Eve face do we want to study? Well, they need energy.  Human bodies, like all ordered structures, need flows of energy to maintain that structure.  The Second...

Sluggish growth but not recession, and no one giving credit to the Fed for hiking rates to increase the deficit and help keep it to a soft landing ;) At least so far it looks to me like a large Covid dip followed by a larger post-Covid bounce followed by a correction to prior levels: More signs of no recession yet:

from Lars Syll The weaknesses of social-scientific normativism are obvious. The basic assumptions refer to idealized action under pure maxims; no empirically substantive lawlike hypotheses can be derived from them. Either it is a question of analytic statements recast in deductive form or the conditions under which the hypotheses derived could be definitively falsified are excluded under ceteris paribus stipulations. Despite their reference to reality, the laws stated by pure economics...

Permits and starts have fallen off but are still above pre-Covid levels. This particular sector is presumed to be the target of Fed rate hikes. I suspect it is a temporary setback with buyers taking a wait and see attitude, as employment continues to grow: The post-Covid bounce continues with no sign of recession. US energy costs are relatively low which is helping drive the export component: Peter Coy’s NYT article today was about my assertion that rate hikes are adding...

from Ken Zimmerman  (originally a comment) Economic life is the activities through which people produce, circulate and consume things, the ways that people and societies secure their subsistence or provision themselves. Activities by which communities sustain themselves. ‘[T]hings’ is, however, an expansive term. It includes material objects, but also the immaterial: labor, services, knowledge and myth, poems, religion, names and charms, and so on. In different times and places, different...

My latest column in Independent Australia Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

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:

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 […]