Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Joseph Joyce Exiting the Planet The full impact of President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord will not be fully realized for years, and indeed, decades to come. But the withdrawal is part of a series of disavowals of international agreements and commitments that were created after World War II. It represents a fundamental change away from engagement with allies and partners in the global community to a mindset...

Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto Remember Kansas’s great tax-cutting experiment under Governor Sam Brownback? (Me, sarcastic?) As always in Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore La-La Land, cutting taxes leads to economic nirvana. Except when it doesn’t, and it didn’t in Kansas. I recently wrote about the idiocy of Investor Business Daily‘s criticisms of California, and Paul Krugman carried the ball further, citing me and bringing in...

A Personal Observation On Trump’s “Infrastructure Week” Yes, folks, you may have already forgotten it, but this has officially been Trump’s “Infrastructure Week,” highlighted by his proposal to privatize air traffic control in the US, and his trip to Cincinnati where he in general terms talked about the supposed virtues of privatizing highways, bridges, and airports, While he claims he wants to provide up to $200 billion in federal funding to draw forth a...

The Intelligent Economist lists Angry Bear among the top 100 economics sites in the US.

No, record job openings in JOLTS do not mean that everything is Teh Awesome! Once again most of the commentary on yesterday’s JOLTS report for April was that job openings jumped, so everything is Teh Awesome! <  Sigh  > To recap one more time… In the one and only complete business cycle that we have for this data: First, hires peaked. They started a long plateau in 2005, making a 3 month peak in late 2005, with no meaningful progress thereafter. Second,...

Trump Blows Up The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Well, maybe it has blown itself up, but Trump’s supposedly triumphant visit to Saudi Arabia looks to have exacerbated underlying tensions within the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose members include Saudi Arabia (KSA), Kuwait,Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman. This was the part of Trump’s overseas trip that most US media has accepted as being a nearly great performance...

A Day in the Life of the jobs market, May 2017 Fifty years ago, when I was a little teenybopper,  his album came out and blew me away: Why bore you with this ancient Boomer reminiscence? Because the unemployment rate has only been lower than last month’s 4.3% in only six of the last 50 years, and only two of them in the last 46 years: Since February 1970, the only time the unemployment rate has been less than it is now is from 1999 into 2001. That’s not...

by Peter Dorman   (originally published at Econospeak) The Cost of Climate Change: It’s Not About Psychology You know there are problems with economics when things that are perfectly reasonable in the context of economic theory are clearly absurd once you step out of it.  Case in point: the claim in today’s New York Times piece by Neil Irwin that the economic cost of climate change vs the actions we’d need to mitigate it depends on “how, as a society, we...

May jobs report: nothing more nor less than a decent late cycle report HEADLINES: +138,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.4% to 4.3% U6 underemployment rate down -0.2% from 8.6% to 8.4% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: down -146,000 from 5.707 million to 5.561 million Part time for economic reasons: down -53,000 from 5.272...

Gas prices on verge of turning negative YoY There are two important aspects to the inflation rate right now. One, as Dean Baker reminds us today, is that most of core inflation has been caused by housing, via “owners equivalent rent.”  Take that out, and inflation is only 1%: The second important aspect is that almost all the variation in headline inflation is due to the price of gas. At the beginning of this year, I thought one of the big issues would be...