Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Degeneration of Bipartisan Blog Sites: Econbrowser This is probably just a whiny complaint of well-known and long running issues.  Indeed for a long time most blog sites (not to mention most twitterspheres and Instogram Idiotspheres) have been mono-partisan in those who participate in their discussions/debates. This has been true for a long time for most sites in the Econoblogosphere, including this site, which clearly tilts “left,” even though we have...

Pledging Zero Carbon Emissions by 2030 or 2050: Does it Matter? We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream legislators.  How significant is this difference?  Does where you stand on climate policy depend on whether your policy has a 2030...

Both long leading components of Q2 GDP declined UPDATED with revisions and further comments The headline number for the first estimate of real GDP in Q2 2019 was 2.1%, as I’m sure you’ve read elsewhere. As is usual, I’m not so interested in what is, after all, what the view in the rear view mirror is, as what the leading components can tell us about what lays ahead. In that regard, both leading components of GDP declined. – Real private fixed...

Dan here.  You will be reading more of him soon…David Zetland has contributed here on water issues via Aguanomics. He now publishes his blog The one-handed economist.  He is a native Californian who moved to Amsterdam several years ago. David is an assistant professor of political economy at Leiden University College, a liberal arts school located in The Hague. He teaches courses in social and business entrepreneurship, cooperation in the commons, and...

Why is the 2% inflation target sacred ? A very strong case can be made that a higher target would be better, because it would mean normal nominal interest rates are further from the (near) zero lower bound. DeLong and Summers made this point in the 90s . AEA President and former IMF head economist OJ Blanchard made it in 2010. Yet it gets nowhere. The 2% target is the gold standard of the 21st century. There is no historical or theoretical basis for...

Under Trump the federal deficit has rebounded to some 4.4 % of GDP  — it is the same whether you look at it quarterly or monthly data as this chart does.  The monthly estimate is calculated by Haver Analytics. So much for the tax cut paying for itself. The shaded areas are by Presidential term, not of recessions as is usually the case.  Typically, Republicans leave office with a larger deficit than they inherited while Democrats leave with a smaller one,...

Housing has bottomed With the release of new home sales this morning, and existing home sales yesterday, it is increasingly apparent that housing has bottomed – just as I said a number of months ago that it would sometime this spring. To the graphs! New home sales (blue in the graph below) bottomed last October, at 557,000 units annualized. As of June, they were at 646,000: This isn’t as good as earlier this spring, but is better than every other...

by New Deal democrat My forecast for the rest of 2019 is . . . . . . . up at Seeking Alpha! I’ll be doing my long term forecast through mid year 2020 once Q2 GDP comes out on Friday. It’ll probably get posted sometime next week. P.S. Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday. I submitted the above to SA on Sunday, but they didn’t get around to putting it up until late yesterday afternoon.  If I have the energy, I’ll put up an extra post maybe this...

Frank Ackerman, 1946-2019 The world of economics suffered a sad loss a few days ago (July 15) with the death of Frank Ackerman.  Frank was a mainstay of the activist left within the profession; he was one of the founders of the magazine Dollars and Sense and could always be found at activities of the Union for Radical Political Economics.  He was notable for being one of the most exacting of critical economists, never substituting political passion for...

Mankiw Misrepresents a Story on Senator Sanders Campaign Worker Negotiations Greg Mankiw reads this story and writes: Staffers in the Sanders campaign, who are working on salary, complain that they are paid less than the $15 per hour that Senator Sanders advocates for the minimum wage. So Sanders raises their hourly wage. Does that increase their income? No, because he raised the hourly wage by cutting the number of hours they work! Of course, if a...