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Read More »How Housing Policy Benefits from a Socioeconomic Perspective
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Read More »I can’t resist appropriating a good meme.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]I can’t resist appropriating a good meme.
Read More »Trouble Brewing
On multiple levels, in both the Third World and the developed world.[embedded content]It doesn’t have to be a catastrophe, however, since Western governments can implement a large-scale industrial policy to bring back manufacturing and reverse the trend of de-industrialisation.The mass unemployment that will result must be solved by government programs to create socially and economically useful work for decent wages, and maintenance of aggregate demand by fiscal policy.
Read More »Where on earth is growth in Greece going to come from?
It's not going to come from people working more. Excerpt from the IMF's latest Debt Sustainability Analysis for Greece, just released: Oh dear. Quite apart from the negative contribution to growth, the prospect of unemployment taking 44 years to return to something approaching normality is simply appalling for Greece's population. I've looked in more detail at this here (Forbes).Well, if labour isn't going to drive growth, there's always investment, yes?Er, not really. The outlook for...
Read More »A Global Marshall Plan for Joblessness?
By Pavlina Tcherneva(Crossposted from INet) Global unemployment is expected to surpass 200 million people for the first time on record by the end of 2017, according a recent ILO study, and limitations of official statistics suggest that the problem is much larger . As conventional measures increasingly fail to produce tight labor markets and jobless recoveries become the norm, economists grapple with this new reality by calling it secular stagnation and by adjusting upwards the rates of...
Read More »Jobs numbers and slow recovery
Jobs report (BLS, Employment Situation Summary) confirms a relatively weak month in April with total nonfarm payroll employment increasing by 160,000. Also, the labor force participation rate decreased and the employment-population ratio both decreased a bit. Mining employment continued to decline, something that Trump promised to reverse and Clinton noted there might not be much we can do about (the implications might not be minor, see here). Also, while unemployment remains at 5% a broader...
Read More »Euro area depression, charted
"The euro area economy is gradually emerging from a deep and protracted downturn. However, despite improvements over the last year, real GDP is still below the level of the first quarter of 2008. The picture is more striking still if one looks at where nominal growth would be now if pre-crisis trends had been maintained." So said Peter Praet, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, in a recent presentation to the FAROS Institutional Investors' Forum.He's not wrong. From his presentation,...
Read More »The dangers of historical taboos
The Group of 30 central bankers and economists has produced a new report, "Fundamentals of central banking: lessons from the crisis". It traces the history of central banking theory and practice, including the economic thought that underlies it. And it draws from it some important lessons about the causes of the 2008 crisis and the reasons for the very long, slow recovery. I've discussed the main themes of the report here (Forbes).But in this post, I want to focus on a particular piece of...
Read More »The 1870s Economic Crisis in America: Reality versus Rothbard
It doesn’t matter how many times Rothbard’s view of the 1870s is refuted, Austrians and libertarians simply continue to shun reality and repeat Rothbard’s errors (such as here and here).It can’t hurt to review the data.First, industrial production. The best and most recent index of US industrial production in this era is Davis (2004) (see Hanes 2013: 121), which draws on many more industrial products and services than other, older indices.The data from Davis shows that US industrial...
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