Tag Archives: US economy

"The Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) provide a quarterly measure of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, based on a comprehensive integration of disaggregated household-level wealth data with official aggregate wealth measures.…" More data. The Case for Concerted Action Distributional Financial Accounts Of The United StatesV. Ramanan

The U.S. economy is booming and unemployment is at a low, but that doesn't paint the whole picture of the financial reality of the average American.According to a new report from Prosperity Now, millions of Americans are one missed paycheck away from poverty.The report found that 40% of American households are "liquid asset poor," meaning that they don't have enough money put away to make ends meet at the poverty level should their income be suddenly interrupted. That figure jumps to 57%...

The stock market’s recent correction has been more abrupt than you’d expect if the market were in the early stages of a major decline. I say that because one of the hallmarks of a major market top is that the bear market than ensues is relatively mild at the beginning, only building up a head of steam over several months. Corrections, in contrast, tend to be far sharper and more precipitous. 1. For what it's worth, I tend to agree with this position in that the fundamentals of the US...

Given his erratic behavior, from daily Twitter eruptions to upping his tally of lies by the hour, it’s hard to think of Donald Trump as a man with a plan. But in at least one area — reshaping the economy to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex — he’s (gasp!) a socialist in the making.… William Hartung apparently misses that the first step in the plan is reality distortion, also known as "gaslighting." With such field distortion, establishing truth becomes impossible on...

By way of falsehood, the WSJ said that:It’s clear that the Republican policy mix of tax reform, deregulation and general encouragement for risk-taking rescued an expansion that was fading fast and almost fell into recession in the last six quarters of the Obama Administration. The nearby chart tells the story that Mr. Obama and his economists won’t admit. Soaring business and consumer confidence have been central to this rebound. The ‘Chart’ in question was just the Quarterly percent...

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States). The numbers for...

I'm not a forecaster. I do macro, and worked for Wynne Godley at the Levy, but I feel that there are too many dangers in forecasting. Wynne was also, btw, more concerned with what he called medium term scenarios, than pinpointing when a recession would take place. The obvious joke applies here. Economists have predicted 10 of the last 9 recessions. Having said that let me do the exact opposite and throw caution to the wind.So I'm going out on a limb here. Everybody thinks the recession...

On October 5, the White House released a 139-page report, "Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States." The report had been originally due to be completed in April, but the deadline was extended, due to the importance of the study and the involvement of the Defense Department, the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department and the White House in researching and writing it. The report is unclassified (there...

In handicapping the US-China conflict, Keynesian demand management is a better guide than comparative advantage. In principle, China can avoid any damage at all from US tariffs simply by responding with a full-scale Keynesian stimulus.... Trump’s surprisingly successful rhetorical technique of “shout loudly and carry a white flag” helps to explain the consistent inconsistency of his foreign policy. The US-China trade war is likely to provide the next example. Project SyndicateWhy the US...

The recovery has since picked up speed, so the deficit should be falling especially fast right now. Unfortunately, the FRED data site does not have updated figures, but the deficit is no longer falling. Indeed it’s exploding, expected to reach $1.1 trillion in 2019. Nothing like this has ever happened in America during a period of peace and prosperity. There is such a firehose of spending that Washington is hardly able to shovel dollars out the door as fast as they are being...