Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Does Turkish Lira Decline Mean Turkey Leaves NATO? Probably not, but Turkey is about to receive Russian S-400 missiles against US demands.  More signifigantly the US will kill high level US F-35 agreements, and will not fly US planes over Turkey if it uses the Russian systems.  This threatens Turkish membership in NATO. The immediate result of this in financial markets has been a substantial decline of the Turkish lira over the last several weeks.  While...

Real average and aggregate wages improved in June Now that we have the June inflation reading, let’s finish out our week focusing on the labor market. First of all, nominal average hourly wages in June increased +0.2%, while consumer prices increased +0.1%, meaning real average hourly wages for non-managerial personnel increased +0.1%. Together with upward revisions to prior months, this brings real wages up to 97.2% of their all time high in January...

The Condition Of North Korean Conventional Weapons This is based on essentially gossip, or if you prefer, a rumor.  I have been dining in Washington again and someone there who is in fact both well known and very well informed, but whom I shall not name, made a comment about the state of conventional weapons in DPRK and also said that this has not been publicly known.  According to this person their condition is much worse than publicly believed.  So out...

The Rise of Global Innovation by US Multinationals Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, and J. Bradford Jensen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics provide an interesting discussion of the risks and opportunities from the following: Total US R&D spending as a share of GDP increased slightly from 2.5 percent in 1999 to 2.7 percent in 2016.2 Multinationals are an important driver of aggregate R&D spending in the United States.3...

May JOLTS report is weak, consistent with last month’s weak jobs report The jobs report one month ago was poor, so as expected the JOLTS report for May, released this morning, followed suit. To review, because this series is only 20 years old, we only have one full business cycle to compare. During the 2000s expansion: Hires peaked first, from December 2004 through September 2005 Quits peaked next, in September 2005 Layoffs and Discharges peaked next,...

Scenes from the June employment report As I (and everyone else) wrote on Friday, the establishment portion of the June jobs report was very good. On closer examination, though, the leading components of the report continued to show some weakness. To begin with, for months I’ve been following manufacturing, residential construction, and temporary employment as the leading sectors. As the below graph of the past 18 months shows, all were positive in...

The Expansion Of Assets With Negative Nominal Interest Rates Buried in the Weekend section of the Financial Times is a report that the aggregate value of assets that earn negative nominal yields has substantially expanded since the beginning of 2019 and has reached a new high.  So on January 1, 2019, the value of these assets was at $8.3 trillion.  As of six months later it had reached $13 trillion, a more than 50 percent increase.  There are fewer...

Everybody and their brother has an opinion about the direction of long bond yields so  it should be OK for me to stick my two cents worth in. This chart of the composite of all long bond yields versus the long wave is one I published every month on the back cover of my monthly publication for over 20 years before I retired a couple of years ago.  Basically, I thought of it as a good way  to show that I was a long term bull on interest rates in a way that...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Lower long term interest rates continue to improve the long range forecast, while the short term forecast has deteriorated. As usual, clicking over and reading puts a penny or two in my pocket to help reward me for my efforts.

I am thinking about modern macroeconomic methodology again. I am also thinking about the fresh water school of thought. Also I am thinking about aspirin and smallpox. I am going to attempt a nickle summary of the Lucas critique (really a half penny summary or a 5 Turkish Lira summary). Lucas argued that it was unwise to base policy on models which fit the available data, because parameters can be estimated even if they do not describe causal...