Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

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...

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...

Conspiracy Theories: How to Pick Out the Plausible Ones This is an age of rampant conspiratorialism.  Bill Gates is behind the pandemic because he wants to shoot you full of vaccines.  No wait, it’s all those 5G cell towers.  Or maybe it’s bioterrorism from China.  Or just a hoax perpetrated by international capital to undermine Donald Trump, the people’s tribune.  The right wing disinformation machine cranks out this stuff constantly, but paranoid...

Conspiracy Theories: How to Pick Out the Plausible Ones This is an age of rampant conspiratorialism.  Bill Gates is behind the pandemic because he wants to shoot you full of vaccines.  No wait, it’s all those 5G cell towers.  Or maybe it’s bioterrorism from China.  Or just a hoax perpetrated by international capital to undermine Donald Trump, the people’s tribune.  The right wing disinformation machine cranks out this stuff constantly, but paranoid...

I have been monitoring  the close relationship between bond yields and monetary velocity ( personal income/zero maturity money) for years without coming to strong conclusion about what to make of it.  In particular, it displays the long term secular rise and fall of bond yields before and after 1980.. I do not know of any other economic variable that parallels bond yields so tightly for such a long period.  OK, first question.  Which way does the causal...

I have been monitoring  the close relationship between bond yields and monetary velocity ( personal income/zero maturity money) for years without coming to strong conclusion about what to make of it.  In particular, it displays the long term secular rise and fall of bond yields before and after 1980.. I do not know of any other economic variable that parallels bond yields so tightly for such a long period.  OK, first question.  Which way does the causal...

“Dr. Doom” At It Again: Predicts 10-Year Depression That would be Nouriel Roubini of NYU who got his moniker back during the Great Recession, which he called pretty well in 2006.  He did this clearly yesterday in an interview in The Intelligencer, although he has been pushing something like this for some time now, bringing in all sorts of things like climate change and more pandemics to reinforce this long run forecasr, although he thinks in a decade...

“Dr. Doom” At It Again: Predicts 10-Year Depression That would be Nouriel Roubini of NYU who got his moniker back during the Great Recession, which he called pretty well in 2006.  He did this clearly yesterday in an interview in The Intelligencer, although he has been pushing something like this for some time now, bringing in all sorts of things like climate change and more pandemics to reinforce this long run forecasr, although he thinks in a decade...