Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The interest rate-sensitive long leading indicators largely turned positive as soon as the coronavirus crisis hit. As lockdowns have eased, several of the short leading indicators have also now turned – or at least are a lot less awful. If the easing up and/or the huge protests result in a surge of new coronavirus cases, that could...

Global Oil Demand Rises Back on April 20 we saw briefly the bizarre appearance of negative oil prices in certain markets. Today for the first time in many months Brent crude briefly topped $40 per barrel, although it fell back below that level (WTI is tending to be about $3 behind it, despite a single day recently when for the first time in years it nearly matched Brent crude at only 18 cents lower). However, it looks like the recent trend of global oil...

If only it were so simple by Ken Melvin The covid-19 pandemic has been difficult to get a handle on; so much unknown, everyday so much new info. It will probably take years for the world to fully to understand all that the 2020 covid-19 pandemic entailed. The George Floyd protests are all too familiar. The gut wrenching images from Minneapolis angered the nation. I don’t know what it’s like to be black in America; don’t feel that I have the right to...

Ironies Of Minneapolis In 1944 the Minnesota Democratic Party united with the Farmer-Labor Party to form the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, one of the most progressive state branches of the US Democratic Party.  In 1948 its mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey introduced at the national convention the resolution supporting civil rights for African-Americans whose acceptance led to a walkout by Strom Thurmond and other Dixiecrats, with...

by Joseph Joyce Is There a Future for FDI?—Update The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which recently reported on foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2019, has released a new study on the impact of the pandemic on future FDI. The OECD points out notes that FDI flows before the pandemic have been on a downward trend since 2015, and FDI flows in 2018 and 2019 were lower than any years since 2010, suggesting that the decline in...

by Ken Melvin 3rd World — It didn’t happen overnight. The nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in, say, Southeast Asian, African, South American, … countries, invariably refer to the tenuous hold on life of their working poor; they don’t really have a job. Each day they rise and go forth looking for work that pays enough that they and their family can continue to subsist. It is, in some countries, a long-standing...

Meanwhile, As Minneapolis Burns So now we are all focused on the recent horrific murder in Minneapolis and now the subsequent events that are happening in many parts of the nation, with Minneapolis the epicenter.  This is serious, and I have an idea how it will end.  This has even distracted us from the usual pandemic and economic issues, which are historically serious. But while all this has been going on, just in the past week or so our president has...

April personal income and spending: considering the extreme circumstances, a good report April personal income and spending, reported this morning, showed the impact of both the lock downs and the stimulus that was passed by the Congress. To cut to the chase, spending in real inflation-adjusted terms declined -13% (red), while real income rose 11%(blue): Unlike the recent jobs report, this is not a byproduct of the layoffs that were concentrated in...

Death And The Pandemic Economy The relation between death and the pandemic economy is a fraught one that has become hotly debated, although with not much clear empirical evidence.  I note that recently over on Econbrowser Menzie Chinn has had a series of posts on this matter in various forms.  Obviously a big issue has been the claim by the anti-lockdown crowd that not reopening the economy quickly will lead to an increase in suicides by the...

Lawrence Summers discovers bargaining power Mainline macroeconomics pretends to be “value neutral,” by which practitioners mean that they assign no moral value to the supply or demand curves to the participants in the economy: they simply exist. The question of *why* participants in the economy have particular supply and demand curves is simply not even in the universe of parameters. But in my experience “why” participants in an economy are willing to...