Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

A broad topic (at least it is close to the field in which I am most nearly expert). I am going to write about policy to deal with the economic effects of the Covid 19 epidemic. There has already been an amazingly quick and huge policy response, which generally seems fairly well designed (with different reasonable approaches in different countries). Also there is, of course, an active discussion of what remains to be done and what could have been done...

by Joseph Joyce          Joseph P. Joyce is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, where he holds the M. Margaret Ball Chair of International Relations. He served as the first Faculty Director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs. The Coming Debt Crisis After the 2008-09 global financial crisis, economists were criticized for not predicting its coming. This charge was not totally justified, as there were some who were...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 30 – April 3 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. This was the week when the bottom finally fell out of almost all the remaining data. Clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment on the economy, and reward me a little bit for the effort I put into this endeavor, especially now that I am devoting most of my time to the likely impacts of the coronavirus....

The Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal The Covid-19 pandemic won’t last forever, and at some point we will have to return to figuring out how to respond to the climate crisis.  (What a depressing opening line.  No, I have no desire to live in a world of permanent crisis.)  Is the answer a Green New Deal?  Challenge has just published my analysis of this; you can find the link here. Abstract: The Green New Deal, an attractive agenda of increased...

Remdesivir and Transfer Pricing Part II Now that I sketched out the transfer pricing for Gilead Sciences with respect to their successful HIV and Hep C products (as much as I can say based on publicly available information), it is time to speculate a bit on how Remdesivir may play out. There is a lot we do not know including whether this treatment receives regulatory approval and how it will be priced if it does. Note for example this story: More than...

Credit Spreads: Comparing COVID-19 to the Collapse of Lehman Brothers On March 18, Reuters noted something I have been following of late: Concerns about the impact of the coronavirus on corporate America’s balance sheets has tripled the premium investors are demanding to hold even the highest-rated corporate bonds. The difference between the average yield of investment-grade U.S. bonds over virtually risk-free Treasuries widened to 303 basis points (bps)...

The D Word Yes, depression, and not the psychological type, although the economic type leads to the psychological type, whether ot not it is the other  way around (see Keynes’ “animal spirits). I often make fun of Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post, but in Washington Post today he raised the possibility that we are going into a depression, not just a bad recession.  On TV this evening I heard Austen Goolsby throw it out as well.  I suspect we...

In 2020 A March Of Madness, Econospeak Just before the end of February, President Trump declared that there were only 15 Covid-19 cases in the US, and that “they will soon go to zero.”  Deaths from COVID 19 now passed 3,000 (March 30th) and yesterday Trump declared that because we might have had over 2 million dead if nothing had been done, it would show “we did a good job” if deaths kept to “only” 100,000 to 200,000.  To do this “good job” he has...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 1 by New Deal democrat Here is the update through yesterday (March 31) Over 75% of the US population is now under lockdown, and it appears to be lowering the rate of exponential growth of new infections. Based on South Korea’s experience, a ratio of 15:1 in total tests to results showing infection is the level where there can be some confidence that the infections have been contained. But testing in the past 5 days has...

Remdesivir and Transfer Pricing Gilead Sciences is conducting phase III trials to explore whether this treatment – which did not turn out to be effective against Ebola – might be effective in treating COVID-19. We all hope it will be and if it does pass phase III trials, national income tax authorities will later have to address the transfer pricing implications of any profits Gilead Sciences generates. This blog post is the first of two with this one...