Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Robert J. Samuelson Denounces Economists While often on Mondays at the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson is spouting VSP lines about how we must be responsible and cut Social Security benefits.  However, today he has written on “What economists don’t know,” which comes across as a pretty big spanking for economists, among whom he does not make much differentiation.  We are all pretty much as ignorant as each other and just plain not willing to admit...

Two Recent Studies, Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Long Run Effects of Student Debt Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings.  Here are two abstracts of interest.  I haven’t gone through the papers themselves, so I can’t vouch for their methodologies, but the results they...

Why I’m Not Going to Properly Review “The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart” I’ve been thinking about alternatives to capitalism for a long time now.  I’ve taught several courses on the topic and plan eventually to write up what I think I’ve learned, so naturally I was intrigued by the new book, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism (PRW) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski.  I...

Gas prices fail to ignite overall inflation in April, but real wages flat so far for 2019 The consumer price index rose +0.3% in April, just as in March mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. This is actually a surprisingly small increase because, as I pointed out last month, almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did — up 9% in March and 11% for April — consumer prices as a whole have gone up at least +0.4%....

Are initial jobless claims showing a re-assertion of an underlying weak economic trend? I don’t normally comment on initial jobless claims, but I’m following them with particular interest at this point. Here’s why. Last spring the long leading indicators were still at least weakly positive. I saw growth ahead through Q1 of this year, and getting questionable in Q2. By last summer, the enough long leading indicators were down that I called for a slowdown...

The real trade deficit ( million 2012 $) increased from $81,558 in February to $ 82,054 in March.  The March observation was between the January and February data points so it was not large enough to generate a significant change in imports  0.58 percentage point contribution to first quarter real GDP growth.   In the first quarter real GDP report the significant contribution of foreign trade to real GDP growth has been interpreted by the administration...

Econospeak (Barkley Rosser, pgl, Peter Dorman, Tom Walker) is in the financial section along with  Bonddad blog (New Deal democrat) and  Capital Ebbs and Flows (Joseph Joyce), and I am proud to say have a direct connection to Angry Bear (under general blogs…). Dear Dan, I wanted to let you know that your blog, Angry Bear Blog has been featured in the Top 100 Economics Blogs of 2019 One of the significant changes this year has been the removal of...

(Dan here…Lifted from comments at Spencer’s SP 500 PE) PGL comments: 1. It is strike day for Lyft and Uber. Uber’s IPO is estimated to be at $90 billion which strikes me as way overpriced. Why? Net revenue is only $7.9 billion whereas operating costs are $12 billion for the latest reported year. Their net revenue is 7.5 times that of Lyft. Lyft’s operating costs turn out to be 170% of its net revenues. Interestingly both companies have net revenues that...

March JOLTS report: Hiring and discharges show signs of late cycle deceleration The JOLTS report on labor is noteworthy and helpful because it breaks down the jobs market into a more granular look at hiring, firing, and voluntary quits. Its drawback is that the data only goes back less than 20 years, so from the point of view of looking at the economic cycle, it has to be taken with a large dose of salt. With that disclaimer out of the way, today’s JOLTS...

Iran: An Unfortunate Anniversary And Getting Worse It was a year ago today that President Trump removed the United States from the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran as well as Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, and the EU, under the auspices of the UN Security Council.  According to IAEA inspectors, Iran was fulfilling its part of the agreement, and it has continued to do so up until now as well, despite this unwarranted action by the US, although that...