Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

A thought for Sunday: of basic decency and humanity, and how the economy is shoring up the GOP A few threads of the Trump malAdministration came together this past week. The latest attempt to overturn Obamacare confronted Trump with a choice between his two main goals: basking in a Trump triumph vs. erasing all of Obama’s programs from the history books (in retaliation for Obama humiliating him at the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2011). At the...

When attempting to repeal and not really replace Obamacare, various Republicans demonstrated opposition to the idea of insurance. They objected that healthy people shouldn’t subsidize the health care of sick people — that is their honest view of health insurance is that they are against it. I didn’t keep track of recent examples, googled, and have old examples Paul Ryan (paraphrased — listen to him if you must — I can’t force myself to listen) “The...

Ex-hurricane trend in September industrial production is positive As I outlined earlier this week, a reasonable temporary workaround for industrial production unaffected by the recent hurricanes is to average the 4 regional Fed surveys, minus Dallas, plus the Chicago PMI. Over the long run, each +5 in the average of the indexes is consistent with a +.1 in the manufacturing component of industrial production. Because these indexes have been running “hot”...

Trump’s “Give the Rich a Break” Tax Plan National GOP leaders on Wednesday released a 9-page document that they called a tax “framework” (available here on the Washington Post site) describing in vague terms how they intend to cut taxes for the nation’s wealthiest people while doing very little that serves the government needs. Overall, the GOP framework would amount to about $2.2 TRILLION in less revenue to support federal programs (like protecting the...

How I Came To No Longer Be A Kaldorian Economist Yes, for a period of time, according to some sources, I was a member of the “Kaldorian” school of Post Keynesian  economic thought, although I had not previously thought of myself as such, indeed, had been unaware that there even was such a school of economic thought.  But now, according to such sources, I am no longer a member of such a school.  Indeed, it is not clear that there even is such a school, if...

Wow! Yellin confirms 2% inflation is the Fed’s ceiling You may have already seen this elsewhere, but in case you didn’t, Janet Yellin all but officially confirmed the other day that 2% isn’t in fact the Fed’s target, it’s their ceiling. Per the New York Times: Given that monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation with a substantial lag, it would be imprudent to keep monetary policy on hold until inflation is back to 2 percent,” Ms. Yellen...

A hurricane workaround for industrial production Last week I mentioned that the regional Fed surveys plus the Chicago PMI can be used as a workaround to account for the effects of hurricanes on Industrial Production. It isn’t pretty and by no means is it perfect, but for the (hopefully only) two or three months that we need it, we can use the workaround to give us the underlying trend in production, particularly for manufacturing.This is a two-step...

A hurricane workaround for industrial production Last week I mentioned that the regional Fed surveys plus the Chicago PMI can be used as a workaround to account for the effects of hurricanes on Industrial Production. It isn’t pretty and by no means is it perfect, but for the (hopefully only) two or three months that we need it, we can use the workaround to give us the underlying trend in production, particularly for manufacturing.This is a two-step...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes out the cheap, refillable kind. Who can afford to live there? But wait! Those refurbished old...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Gentrification This is the bane of urban development, right? Old housing stock, built for yesterday’s working class, is spiffed up and priced far out of reach of today’s regular folk. High end shops replace hardware stores, bric-a-brac recyclers and appliance repair centers; a tide of designer coffee flushes out the cheap, refillable kind. Who can afford to live there? But wait! Those refurbished old...