Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

TDS vs ODS vs BDS This is motivated by running on in the econoblogosphere to Trump supporters who when confronted with hard facts they cannot refute revert to name calling that those stating actual facts are suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS).  I have recently seen it thrown out “liberally.”  What is going on here? The beginning of this odd label dates to the George W. Bush era, specifically 2003 when the late Charles Krauthammer, a...

Consumer credit: both producer and consumer sides of the ledger show mortgage market OK, increasing stress for other loans The New York Fed reported on household debt and credit. The good news is that there has been no increase in total delinquencies: This is important because the amount of delinquencies would be expected to increase if we were close to getting into a recession. The somewhat more bad news is that, if the *amount* of delinquencies has...

by Joseph Joyce The Exorbitant Privilege in a World of Low Interest Rates The U.S. dollar has long enjoyed what French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called an “exorbitant privilege.”  The U.S. can finance its current account deficits and acquisition of foreign assets by issuing Treasury securities that are held by foreign central banks as reserves. The dollar’s share of foreign reserves, while falling, remains over 60%.  But in a world of low...

Who Needs Critical Thinking? Apparently not the US military. “Critical thinking” has long been a buzz phrase of US higher education.  There was a time when I could not hear a speech by a higher administrative person at my or other higher ed institutions that did not tout critical thinking as a really important goal of higher ed.  We were all supposed to be teaching it all the time.  I got a bit tired of these incessant speeches, but in fact I agreed with...

We are probably close (~500,000) to “full employment” From time to time over the past few years I have tried to estimate how far we were from “full employment,” by which I meant the average levels of the best year in each of the past two expansions. I also estimated how long it would take to get there given the then-current monthly gains in employment. For example, two years ago I estimated that we needed to add another 2.5 million people, or 1.5% of the...

Rudolf Meidner, one of the unsung economics heroes of the last century, argued for solidarity wages on several grounds, one of which is that low wages subsidize less efficient firms.*  Bring the bottom up, he said, and you will change the mix of enterprises and boost overall productivity.  It’s just a hypothesis, but here’s a bit of recent evidence from a pair of researchers: We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry,...

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%....