Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Diane Coyle,  Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, GDP: Falling Short  (from IMF website here ) Gross domestic product, or GDP, has been used to measure growth since the Second World War when economies were all about mass production and manufacturing. In this podcast, economist Diane Coyle, says GDP is less well suited to measure progress in today’s digital economy. “I think the issue for GDP comes if the pace...

by Hale Stewart  (originally published at Bonddad blog) Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low? A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason why business wasn’t investing.  Instead, the data says business investment is weak because the U.S. has a ton of spare capacity. First, let’s look total capacity utilization: It has peaked at...

GOP Congress: my (wealthy) donors made me do it The GOP’s tax-complicating, deficit-increasing, wealthy-subsidizing, Arctic destroying, Health Care damaging, $1.5 trillion tax “reform” package is unpopular with most Americans, destructive to the government’s ability to fund needed programs from disease prevention to FEMA to basic research to needed infrastructure improvements, and wildly popular with the wealthy GOP donors like the (oil-rich) Koch...

Black Mirror Big Data Becomes Big Brother In China And maybe coming soon to the US as well, enough to make Orwell sit up and take notice. The first show of the 2016 season of the sci fi TV show, “Black Mirror,” called “Nosedive,” showed a future society where people have overall social scores (1-5) that are constantly being changed based on what they do and who they interact with and how.  Access to many things is based on one’s rating.  The female lead...

Do GOP House and Senate reps even know what they voted for? The House passed the awful “tax complication bill of 2017” on Tuesday.  The Senate had to make a few changes because it didn’t comply with the Byrd rules, and then will presumably pass it today. It’ll go back to the House where the HOuse will then take the final vote on the Senate changes and send it to Mr. Trump for signature. The GOP will claim that they have singlehandedly put together a...

The Missing Piece in Plans for an All-Electric Vehicle Fleet: Electricity The New York Times has a piece today on barriers to the replacement of internal combustion-powered vehicles to an all-electric fleet in the United States.  It talks about production costs, the availability of key minerals and the need for a charging station infrastructure, but it oddly passes over the most obvious impediment, at least from the perspective of climate change, the...

Corporatizatizing The All-Administrative University One of the few good things that appears to have happened in the conference committee on the generally awful impending GOP tax bill is that the hits students were going to take have been eliminated.  However, even without that additional burden, college students face costs that are far higher than any other nation and have been rising above inflation rates for decades.  While` students in Denmark...

This chart caught my fancy after reading the interview with Rep. Tom Cole from the previous post. There is still the tendency to see the stock market (or GDP) as a proxy for the economy. And it is a time honored tradition for politicians to claim credit for economic gain in convoluted story telling: (I could not find the attribution for this graph but will add when I find it) Trump bump versus Obama effect on the stock market for the first nine months in...

An interview on CNBC with Rep.Tom Cole offers some insight into the path to voting yes on the tax bill… Alhough mainstream forecasters like the Joint Committee on Taxation and University of Pennsylvania have issued unflattering analyses of GOP proposals, Cole says his tax-committee colleagues tell him other models offer sunnier results in line with his core belief that lower taxes boost the economy… … He doesn’t know what those models are, but doesn’t...

Real wages stagnate YoY, decline significantly since July So lackluster has wage growth been that even the modest uptick in consumer inflation to 2.2% YoY in November means that non-managerial workers have seen virtually no real growth in their paychecks over the last 12 months. With yesterday’s +0.4% increase in consumer prices, here’s what YoY real wages look like for non-managers (blue) and all employees including managers (red): All wages...