Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddad blog) Is This Why Wages Are Low? These are two graphs from a post over at the Center for Equitable Growth.  The top chart shows that the relationship between unemployment and wage growth isn’t as strong as you’d think.  Recent research highlighted by Fed President Bullard made the same observation.  But the bottom chart — now that’s what a tight correlation looks like! I ran a quick, down-and-dirty...

The Incidence of the Obamacare Subsidies Justin Fishel and Mary Bruce covers Trump’s dismantling of Obamacare: The White House announced Thursday night that the administration will slash Obamacare subsidy payments to insurers. The “cost-sharing reduction payments,” worth an estimated $7 billion this year, are intended to reduce out-of-pocket costs for low-income Americans on Obamacare … House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader...

 Ken Houghton retweeted this letter…from the Financial Times; Unused Capacity: “My brothers and I run a relatively small family business with a turnover of below £20m. We could easily cope with a 20 per cent increase in business with no extra staff, and even a 50 per cent increase might require only a 10 per cent increase in staff. This would mean a huge growth in productivity, and I strongly the suspect the same is true for most smaller and even many...

Trump Fails To Certify JCPOA Iran Nuclear Deal I wish to be very precise here on this extremely important matter. President Trump has not “decertified” the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal.  Now Congress must ultimately be responsible. He has, after a lot of discussion and intervention by his national security team, failed to certify the deal.  This is not something that was part of the deal, but an epiphenomenon put in place by the US Congrees as part of a deal...

Enslaved to an Individualist View of Social Change I note with some interest the debate over whether it is ethically necessary to refer to slaveholders as “enslavers” in order to convey our disapproval over their actions.  The obsessive use of the enslaving terminology in The Half Has Never Been Told (Baptist) bothered me at the time, and now I see he was part of a trend. I understand the motivation—up to a point.  Anyone who participated in the slave...

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddad blog) There Is No Commodity Based Inflation Consider the following charts (the top three area daily; the bottom is weekly):  All prices are either declining or stable. The only major ETF that is showing strength is the industrial metals ETF (this is a weekly chart): This explains why non-food and energy prices are subtracting from prices: This is one reason why overall inflation is so...

By Steve Roth  (originally published at Evonomics) How Amazon’s Accounting Makes Rich People’s Income Invisible Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company makes profits, it will have to pay taxes on them. (At least nominally, in theory, 35%!) Then you and your investors will have to pay taxes on them again when...

IMF Fiscal Monitor: Progressive Taxation Need Not Deter Growth The latest from the IMF is a must read for progressives even if it runs contrary to the nonsense coming out of the White House: At the global level, inequality has declined substantially over the past three decades, but within national boundaries, the picture is mixed: some countries have experienced a reduction in inequality while others, particularly advanced economies, have seen a...

Hassett’s Evidence on Transfer Pricing and the U.S. Trade Deficit In my last post, I questioned Kevin Hassett’s claim that transfer pricing manipulation was responsible for half of our trade deficit and asked what was the paper he referenced. We have the text of his speech: There is another important factor to consider when thinking about how these changes will affect the economy. A recent NBER working paper (Guvenen, Mataloni, Raisser and Ruhl 2017)...

Puerto Rico, Transfer Pricing, and Kevin Hassett Scott Greenberg provided a nice summary of what section 936 was and how its expiration had contributed to Puerto Rico’s economic and fiscal difficulties: beginning in 1976, section 936 of the tax code granted U.S. corporations a tax exemption from income originating from U.S. territories. In addition to section 936, the Puerto Rican corporate tax code gave significant incentives for U.S. corporations...