Tag Archives: US economy

  Positive reporting. MMT is now being taken seriously. BloombergWipe Out Student Debt and Everyone Wins, Says Bernie's Economist Katia Dmitrieva and Alexandre Tanzi

Bill analyzes the US private sector. He doesn't deal with the contribution of government, which is running record deficits, or the sectoral balances in this post.Bill Mitchell – billy blogStrong US growth disguises worrying trendsBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

SummaryThe US budget deficit is $147 billion in March 2019; this is a net add to private domestic sector income. Dollars added to the economy by the federal government allow the private sector to post a $147 billion surplus and add to its stock of net financial assets. Private credit growth was again flat and added less than $1.8 billion to the money supply. A big drop from the January contribution of over $70B. Further, income flows from the national government impact investment markets...

"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...