Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 6 – 10 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. How week – or not – the next six months are going to be remains the primary issue. As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you right up to date, as well as rewarding me a little bit for the effort I put in.

Small Town Support for Trump and “The Working Class” Much has been written about voters, sometimes labeled the “white working class”, who live in small towns, have low incomes and supported Trump in 2016.  There are various hypotheses—not, despite the rhetoric, mutually exclusive—that have been proposed to explain this: never-ending latent racism galvanized by the experience of having a black president, a vote of despair in the face of economic decline,...

Are We Living In The “Capitalocene”? I also attended the last session listed in the program at the ASSA at 2:30 on Sunday, an URPE session on “Ecology, the Environment, and Energy,” chaired by Paul Cooney.  He presented on “Marxism and Ecological Economics: An Assessment of the Past, Present, and Future.” Lynne Chester presented on “Energy and Social Ontology: Can Social Ontology Provide Insight?”  Finally Ann Davis presented on “”‘Home on the Range:’...

January’s reports start out with a decidedly mixed picture for 2020 We have our first bits of forward-looking data for the year: November residential construction, December ISM manufacturing, and December light vehicle sales. They paint a decidedly mixed picture. Let’s take a look in order. Residential construction spending improved by a strong 1.9% in November. Further, October, which had originally been reported as a decline, was revised to a 0.7%...

Might We Be On The Verge Of An “Upswing”? One of the more dramatic sessions at the just-completed ASSA meetings in San Diego was an AEA panel on “Deaths from Despair and the Future of Capitalism” on Saturday at 2:30.  Chaired by Angus Deaton, it focused on the book by him and his wife/coauthor Anne Case with the same title as the panel session.  Case spoke on their book.  This was followed by Robert Putnam, who spoke on his forthcoming (in about six...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 30 – January 3 at Seeking Alpha  My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There were marginal moves to the downside on both the producer and consumer sides of the ledger this past week. As usual, clicking over and reading rewards me with just a little bit of $$$ for my efforts.

Is The Chinese Economic System the “Mandarin Growth Model” or the “Chinese-Style Keiretsu System”? The first term in this choice was the title of a paper presented this morning (1/4/20) at the ACES/ASSA session at 8 AM in San Diego by Wei Xiong of Princeton University.  It was a highly mathematical model I shall describe shortly, but which drew heavily on the paper presented before it by Chenggan Xu of Cheng Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing,...

Killing Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis Most of the attention in this recent attack by a US drone at the Baghdad Airport has been on it killing Iranian Quds Force commander, Qasim (Qassem) Solmaini (Suleimani), supposedly plotting an “imminent” attack on Americans as he flew a commercial airliner to Iraq at the invitation of its government and passed through passport control.  But much less attention has been paid to the killing in that attack of Abu Mahdi...

Initial jobless claims still negative, but no recession signal As you know, I’ve been monitoring initial jobless claims closely for the past several months, to see if there are any signs of a slowdown turning into something worse. Simply put, if businesses aren’t laying employees off, those same people are consumers who are going to continue to spend, which is 70% of the total economy. So the lack of any such increase has been the best argument that no...

Forward Creeping Excessmass Wins The War On Christmas “Excessmass” is a term neologized in a column in the late 1990s in the Wall Street Journal (sorry, unable to find precise date) by my JMU colleague, Bill Wood.  A devout Brethren, he was and remains disgusted by the crass commercialism associated with the Christmas holiday in the US. In this column he proposed dividing the holiday into two: a strictly religious one, “the Nativity” without gift giving,...