Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Joseph Joyce When Safe Assets Are No Longer Safe The U.S. has long benefitted from its ability to issue “safe assets” to the rest of the world. These usually take the form of U.S. Treasury bonds, although there was a period before the 2008-09 global financial crisis when mortgage-backed securities with Triple A ratings were also used for this purpose. The inflow of foreign savings has offset the persistent current account deficits, and put...

The Elixir of Commerce McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy: being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica: together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M’Vickar. New York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton...

The Moral Philosophers’ Stone: A Compleat History of ‘A Certain Quantity of Labour to be Performed’ Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as “the lump of labor.” To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th-century political economist of the...

RJS, Focus on Fracking US oil supplies are at a 14 – year low; commercial crude supply at a 42 month low, SPR at a 19½ year low; total oil + products supplies at a 95 month low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending March 25th indicated that even after a big decrease in our oil exports, we had to take oil out of stored commercial crude supplies...

Similar to 1973, we are faced with an energy crisis or a coming one. Our usage/demand is outstripping supply. The nation is a bit more prepared this time. I am not seeing the long lines waiting to add a couple of gallons of gasoline to top off. We have done a lot since 1973 in the US while European countries are doing more. This rendition of 10 points of things we could do is taken from Treehugger, authored by Lloyd Alter, and entitled...

 The Road to SerfRanddom I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — “Why the worst get on top.” Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek’s argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary? Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a...

The Most Evil Rant in Aynkind’s History n previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that “critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant.”  In the latter post, I stuck to the source that Guelzo cited in his...

Conventional Macroeconomics Rears Its Head  It is always annoying to have to admit one has been wrong.  But I was among those who a year ago or so was going along with those who argued inflation was transitory and the rate would probably come down later in the year.  The annoying Larry Summers, along with the somewhat less annoying Olivier Blanchard, prominently argued the contrary, hauling out old-fashioned conventional macroeconomic arguments...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 21 – 25 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The walls closed in a little more on the long leading forecast this week, as now real money supply is beginning to falter. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you thoroughly up to date, and will reward me a little bit for giving you a heads up as to what awaits, economically, in the future....

Outside of agriculture there is a feeling of vast quantities, that farmers produce too much corn, soybeans, cotton, and other monocrops in a habitat destroying, bee killing, rural, backward, government sponsored enterprise that is slowly adding to climate change and environmental destruction. Agriculture is largely reactionary and heavily influenced by capitalism. If the need is there, and the price is right, the crop will be produced. One of the...