Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Housing’s most difficult comparisons in years begin next Wednesday After a real quiet week for news, next week we get retail sales, industrial production, the JOLTS report, existing home sales … and housing permits and starts. The week after, real residential fixed investment will be reported as part of Q3 GDP.  Permits and residential fixed investments will have some of the most challenging comparisons in a long time. Here’s why. First, here’s a graph...

Tracking Trump’s trade wars: inventories and intermodal traffic Here’s something I thought I would start to track: looking for evidence of the effects of Trump’s trade wars on manufacturing and distribution. Producers and distributors aren’t simply going to sit back and wait to absorb new tariff expenses: we should expect them to engage in as much “front-running” as possible, importing the goods and commodities likely to be affected by the tariffs early,...

U.S. Saudi Trade Donald Trump appears to be reluctant to investigate the murder of Jamal Khashoggibecause of an alleged trade deal? Donald Trump has said US investigators are looking into how Jamal Khashoggi vanished at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, but made clear that whatever the outcome, the US would not forgo lucrative arms deals with Riyadh. The president’s announcement raised concerns of a cover-up of evidence implicating Saudi Arabia’s powerful...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Kevin Drum discusses single parent households Disqus won’t let me comment, so I post my comment on this post hereI am honestly impressed that you didn’t mention lead. So I will. The single parent household peak came later than the murder peak — as one would expect. Single parent households last (until another marriage & good luck with that Ms single mom). You graph a stock (OK 3 stocks) each...

Is the taboo against raising wages beginning to break? It’s a *really* slow news week for economic data — just producer and consumer prices tomorrow and Thursday. Even JOLTS doesn’t come out until next week. But there was one little nugget of good news this morning: the NFIB, which represents small businesses, came out with their September report, and there was some good news about wages: more small businesses — 37% — said they *actually* raised wages in...

This is a somewhat late 10th anniversary of the Lehman failure post. I am not going to write much that is new, but will restate an argument I have been making for years (following John Quiggin and Miles Kimball). It is trivially easy for the US Treasury (and other treasuries) to make huge profits on the carry trade. These huge profits are, I claim, actual wealth created by the operation. In general, the argument is that, over all recorded long time...

Scenes from the September jobs report Leaving aside wages, there was lots of sunshine in September’s jobs report, although there were a few gray if not dark clouds on the horizon.  Here’s a look at each: 1. Weekly jobless claims did lead the unemployment rate Two weeks ago, I wrote that the new 40+ year lows in weekly initial jobless claims forecast new lows in the unemployment rate.  Here’s what I said: [I]nitial jobless claims tend to lead the...

Nobel Prizes in Economics, Awarded and Withheld Most of the commentary today on the decision to award Nobel prizes in economics to William Nordhaus and Paul Romer has focused on the recipients.  I want to talk about the nonrecipient whose nonprize is perhaps the most important statement by the Riksbank, the Swedish central bank that decides who should be recognized each year for their work in economics “in memory of Alfred Nobel”. Nordhaus was widely...

by Josepth Joyce The Continuing Dominance of the Dollar Ten years after the global financial crisis, we are still coming to an understanding of how profound a shock it was. The changes in political alignments within and across nations and the diminished public support for globalization continue. But one aspect of the financial system has not changed: the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the monetary system. An article by Fernando Eguren Martin, Mayukh...

I try to avoid forcasting, but I confidently forecast that, in the future, I will continue to try and try to find cases on which I disagree with Paul Krugman. In The Economic Future Isn’t What It Used to Be (Wonkish) Krugman notes that forecasts of potential output of the US and the EU are now far below what they were in 2008. He argues that this probably shows a genuine long run damaging effect of the great recession (following Ball,Fatas, & Summers...