Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Hurricane adjusted initial claims for week of Sept. 2: 239,000 Last week I promised I would repeat an exercise I first undertook in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy disrupted the initial claims data: estimating what the initial jobless claims would have been, but for the hurricane. In 2012 I created that adjustment by backing out the affected states (NY and NJ) from the non-seasonally adjusted data.  That gave me the number of initial claims filed in the other...

by Peter Dorman  (originally published at Econospeak) Price Gouging Whenever there’s a natural disaster, a famine or some other such crisis, people zero in on price gouging.  Are grain merchants jacking up prices to take advantage of a food shortage?  What about airlines raising fares to cash in on desperate attempts to flee an impending hurricane, or stores that double or triple the price on bottled water?  And generators that suddenly only the rich can...

WHO OWNS THE WEALTH IN TAX HAVENS?, an NBER working paper, points to following the money: Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf...

“If you tax investment income what will people do? Stuff their money in the mattress?” Steve Roth | October 15, 2012 9:25 pm Richard Thaler asks exactly the right question. This from the latest IGM Forum poll of big-name economists, on the effects of taxing income from “capital.” I’ve been over this multiple times before, but it’s nice to see the thinking validated by a real economist. If you’ve got money, there is no (practicable) alternative to...

A note on Hurricane Harvey and unemployment claims Initial jobless claims for last week were reported at 298,000 this morning, a jump of over 50,000 from recent levels. As most people probably already know, this huge jump had everything to do with Hurricane Harvey shutting down southeastern Texas, including the entire 7 million Houston metro area. Undoubtedly, the effect will last for weeks. Fortunately, if we want to know what jobless claims would be...

by Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics 2016) Why Economists Don’t Know How to Think about Wealth (or Profits) Until 2006, they quite literally weren’t playing with a full (accounting) deck. Most still aren’t. By Steve Roth 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...

Yet Another Republican President Stabs A South Korean President In The Back [Able to get on here from my home laptop] Donald Trump has long had a record of doing things one finds not just unbelievable, but seriously outrageous.  However, we may now have seen him do so in a situation involving a really dangerous foreign policy situation, the threat of a war on the Korean peninsula, a war that could involve nuclear weapons and could involve not just...

by Joseph Joyce Trump and International Finance International trade and immigration were flashpoints of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and in his first year he has shown that he intends to fulfill his promises to slow down the movements of goods and people. Last month negotiations over NAFTA began with Canada and Mexico, with the U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer announcing that current bilateral deficits “can’t continue.” The President...

(Dan here…lifted from Bonddadd blog; better a little late than miss it) by New Deal democrat The single most important fact this Labor Day On Labor Day, highlighting the single most important secular problem in the US economy: If there is a silver lining, it is that the hemorrhaging has stopped since the end of the last recession. But we are long past the point where we need another corporate tax cut. We desperately need to increase Labor’s share of our...

Now may be a good time to remind people that there can be bad arguments for good causes. There may even be good arguments for bad causes. Sessions is wrong: The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal...