Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Are Voters In Nations With A Poland Problem Especially Sophisticated?  The argument here is that a nation with a Poland problem has a disconnect between its economic conditions and its political  outcomes.  It could be argued that in such a case the voters of that nation may realize that elected leaders (especially presidents in the US) have much less control over economic outcomes than voters in most nations give them credit or blame for.  So they vote...

Real wages in 2017 Now that we have the report on consumer prices for December, let’s take a look at what happened with real wages in 2017. Consumer prices increased +0.1% in December, and wages for non-managerial workers rose 0.3%,  This for that month the average worker earned 0.2% more. For the year, the nominal wages of non-managerial workers rose 2.4%, while prices increased 2.1%, meaning that for the entire year workers saw a whopping 0.3%...

Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions.  Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on in the economy. Specifically, Galbraith is worried that the consumer is the only game in town — and that can’t last....

JOLTS report confirms November payrolls strength I’m changing my presentation of JOLTS data somewhat compared with the last year or two.  At this point I’ve pretty much beaten the dead horses of (1) “job openings” are soft and unreliable data, and should be ignored in contrast with the hard “hires” series; and (2) the overall trend is that of late expansion but no imminent downturn.So let’s start a little differently, by comparing nonfarm payrolls from...

Negative Interest Rates and a Term Structure Puzzle James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending on goods and services. Please read the entire post including some interesting...

Does the United States Have A “Poland Problem”? It certainly looks like it. Again, for anybody not having seen one of these, a “Poland problem” involves an apparent disconnect between economics and politics, nations with reasonably well performing economies where the populace becomes unhappy and supports opposition, especially “populist” nationalist authoritarian candidates, with 2015 victory in Poland of the Law and Justice Party the poster boy for...

In the next evolution of economics taking shape around us and among us, perhaps no school has been so transformational over recent decades as a loose, worldwide group best described as “accounting-based” economists. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), with its central tenet of “stock-flow consistency” (or stock-flow coherence) is at the center and forefront of this group. These accounting-based economists more than any others managed to accurately predict our...

A US economic Boom in 2018? For the last several years, I have tried to identify several graphs that most bear watching over the ensuing 12 months. This year, in addition to watching bond yields like everybody else, the data that most bears watching, it seems to me, can be summed up in the question: Is the US economy about to enter a Boom? The recent economic news has almost all been good. In particular the unemployment rate has dropped as low as 4%....

How Trump Killed The Anti-Government Protests In Iran By very strongly and publicly supporting them and dragging the matter to the UN Security Council   Of course, his supporters have been praising his “strong action” in comparison with Obama’s quiet approach to the 2009 demonstrations, meant to reduce accusations of the demonstraters being US pawns.  Those demos went on a long time with large numbers eventually killed.  In this case, Trump has made the...

by Steven Roth “In the Beginning…Was the Unit of Account” – Twelve Myths About Money November 19th, 2017 Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with him afterwards, and we followed up with a few emails. The quotation in the title of this post is...