Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

New home sales roar back to pre-pandemic levels At some point – probably three or four months after Joe Biden takes the oath of office on January 20 of next year, G*d willing – the coronavirus pandemic is going to be brought under control in the US. At that point the long leading indicators are going to be very important in terms of the immediate direction of the US economy. And the news on that score is very good, as shown by new home sales for June,...

The short leading indicators and the 2020 Presidential election forecast As I pointed out on Sunday, polls and poll aggregations really aren’t forecasts, they are nowcasts. They tell you who would win and by how much *if the election were held today.* They don’t tell you whether or by how much that is likely to change over the next few months. Further, candidates, campaigns, and voters react to them, and so change the dynamics. And in the case of several...

Initial claims: a jolt of bad news, as Mitch McConnell and the GOP dawdle on an emergency benefit extension This morning’s report on initial and continuing claims, which give the most up-to-date snapshot of the continuing economic impacts of the coronavirus on employment, was a jolt of bad news, as claims increased by over 100,000 to the worst level in 4 weeks. The trend of slight improvement to “less awful” since the end of March was broken, and there...

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Irish Jobs Act Brad Setser has more to say about how the lack of enforcement with respect to transfer pricing in the Big Pharma sector has not only cost us Federal tax revenues but perhaps in American jobs in his “The Irish Shock to U.S. Manufacturing?” (May 25, 2020): America’s production of pharmaceuticals and medicines peaked in 2006, back before the global financial crisis. Output now is about 20 percent below its 2006 level....

Biden Proposes Ending the GILTI Loophole Alex Parker covers an interesting and important tax policy issue: Former Vice President Joe Biden’s recent proposal to secure medical supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic includes tweaks to the 2017 federal tax overhaul, reigniting the debate about whether its international provisions are pushing manufacturing facilities offshore …Former Vice President Joe Biden’s recent proposal to secure medical...

RIP Tonu Puu Seems like more people I know are dying.  In this case it is a good friend of mine and occasional co-author, the Swedish economist, Tonu Puu, who was born in Estonia of an Estonian father and a mother of German ancestry.  As it was, he ended up speaking a very large number of languages, as well as being very cosmopolitan in many other ways. He was 83 years old and had cancer for some time, which is what I presume he did of, although the...

June retail sales: some actual good news; the entirety of the pandemic decline has been reversed Retail sales are the third report for June out of the four main coincident indicators that show whether the economy is in recession or expansion. And they were the third that grew again for the month. In fact, in real, inflation-adjusted terms they were higher than in February, the last month before the coronavirus pandemic hit: They were also only 0.4%...

Industrial production rebounds, but will manufacturing employment continue to do so? Industrial production is the King of Coincident Indicators. The NBER almost always identifies month of the end, and frequently the beginning, of recessions based on the top and bottom of this statistic. This morning it was reported to have risen for the second month in a row in June. Let’s take a little deeper look. First, here’s the graph of both overall (blue) and...

More Likely Bad Economic Forecasting: This Time From OECD And CBO That would be the quintessential establishment and boringly conventional Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based “rich nations'” entity that grew out of the Marshall Plan and has a reputation for excellent data, and also the Congressional Budget Office, generally regarded as bipartisan and highly professional. So I saw their forecasts of US economic...

Capitalism and Class by Ken Melvin Whence this attitude that the working class is expendable and that the middle and upper classes are not? Donald J. Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Betsy DeVos, being the brave, patriotic souls that they are, demand, for the sake of the nation, that the working class step-up and take the risk of going back to work and sending their working-class kids to school an do so without sufficient protective measures in force and with...