Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Peter Turchin What Is the Role of Morality in a Capitalist Economy?  published at Evonomics is worth a visit…it is academic but can offer material for discussion, involving several economists.  I am not going to try to summarize.

Gimme shelter update: housing purchase affordability Let’s update one measure of housing prices: comparing of the purchasing power of buyers vs. the price a typical house.  There are at least 3 indexes. First, here is the N.A.R.’s “Housing affordability index,” updated through May. This compares their estimate of median household income vs. the median price of an existing home: Note that the data isn’t seasonally adjusted, so there is an annual...

Further comments about the state of the housing market Here are some additional salient comments about the housing market right now. 1. Existing home sales are completely stagnant Not only did existing home sales fall for the month, not only are they down slightly YoY, but they are now less than 2% higher than where they were 3 years ago: In May 2015, houses sold at a 5.35 million annualized rate. In today’s repot they were reported as selling at...

Preponderance of evidence from poor housing permits points to slowdown in GDP The preponderance of evidence, based on this morning’s report on housing permits and starts, is that increased interest rates and continuing increased prices are beginning to take a bite out of the market. First of all, let’s take a look at single family permits — the most reliable, least volatile of all the measures — (red, left scale) and total permits (blue, right...

Prime age employment participation and wages: not so clear a relationship In the last couple of months variations of the same graph which is supposed  to “solve” the wage conundrum have been going around. I saw another version this weekend: Easy to see, there is what looks like a nice, nearly linear relationship between the prime age (25-54) employment to population ratio (left scale) with wages as measured by the employment cost index (ECI)(bottom...

What to Do about Conservative Rationality in Addressing Climate Change? Two business-friendly conservatives, both former senators, Trent Lott and John Breaux, have an op-ed in today’s New York Times announcing the formation of new group, Americans for Carbon Dividends.  Now out of office, they recognize climate change as “one of the great challenges of our generation.”  To counteract it they propose a bipartisan coalition to institute a carbon tax, with...

by Bradford DeLong   (originally published at Grasping Reality with Both Hands) THE DAMNATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL REPUBLICAN POLICY INTELLECTUALS I have long known that the thoughtful and pulls-no-punches Amitabh Chandra has no tolerance for fuzzy thinking from Do-Gooder Democrats. He is one of those who holds that not even a simulacrum of utopia is open to us here, as we muck about in the Sewer of Romulus here in this Fallen Sublunary Sphere. ”There are...

Children make the bestest hostages Criticisms of Trump in the business press are especially instructive, because they have no obvious partisan motivation. So Josh Barro’s article at Business Insider this morning, castigating his “bully-and-threaten approach to dealmaking,” is particularly noteworthy. He writes: Donald Trump has a negotiating tactic he really likes: Threaten to do something someone else will really hate, and then offer to stop if they...

Does Greg Mankiw Know the History of U.S. Trade Policy? Greg offers us a nice speech by Saint Reagan. While Ronald Reagan preached free trade, Jeffrey Frankel notes that his actual record was rather protectionist. The discussion is an excellent account of how Republicans have been protectionist since 1854. But the really weird thing in Reagan’s discussion was how he claimed the U.S. has been a free trade nation since 1776. Of course Congress passed...

May industrial production: meh Industrial production is the ultimate coincident indicator. It is almost invariably the number that determines economic peaks and troughs. In May it declined -0.1%. While that obviously isn’t a positive, it does nothing to suggest any sort of change of trend: and is in line with any number of similar monthly numbers during the expansion. In this second graph I’ve broken it down into manufacturing (blue, left scale)...