Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

RIP David M. Grether  I have only just now learned that Dave Grether died on Sept. 12 of causes unreported at age 82. He was an emeritus prof of econ at Cal Tech.  He received his PhD in 1969 from Stanford in econometrics. He soon was at Cal Tech where he spent the rest of his career, soon becoming an early figure in experimental economics, co-authoring papers with a colleague, Charles Plott, whom many think should have shared the Nobel Prize with...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource I — Introduction About a decade ago, I wrote a short piece about “labour power as a common-pool resource” that got picked up by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and led to me being invited to a conference on the commons in Berlin put on by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. I would now like to amend that to regard disposable time as the common-pool resource in question. Much of my original rationale applies...

by Joseph Joyce The Return of FDI Last year’s collapse in foreign direct investment was seen by many as the first stage of a period of retrenchment. Political pressure to “reshore” production, particularly of goods of national importance such as medical equipment, would cause multinational firms to rearrange their global supply chains to minimize foreign exposure. The data released for FDI in the first half of this year shows that in fact,...

The Debut of the Deranged DOOOMers, 2021 edition: No, the strong advance of the Index of Leading Indicators is not forecasting a recession Five to ten years ago, I used to have a lot of fun taking the hide off DOOOMers. You know, the pundits who always find some new statistic or other that absolutely shows (for today only! Until the statistic goes the other way, in which case there’s radio silence) that the economy is DOOOMed!!!Well, I am...

As always, I am bloviating on a matter where I am not expert. I do sometimes wonder what the hell we should do with the strange human invention called intellectual property. It can be argued that it was a brilliant invention. For example the US Constitutional Convention wrote “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;”...

Blogger and Commenter RJS, 3rd Quarter GDP Grew at a 2.1% Rate, Revised from 2.0%; All on Inventories, No Real Final Sales The Second Estimate of our 3rd Quarter GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicated that our real output of goods and services grew at a 2.1% annual rate over the quarter, revised from the 2.0% growth rate reported in the advance estimate a month ago, as personal consumption expenditures grew more than was previously...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 22 – 26 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Despite the roiling of the financial waters (on thin trading, with all of the A-list movers and shakers away from their desks) on Friday, the underlying indicators for the economy in all timeframes remain generally positive. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment about...

RJS at MarketWatch 666, October Durable Goods: New Orders Down 0.5%, Shipments Up 1.5%, Inventories Up 0.6% The Advance Report on Durable Goods Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders for October (pdf) from the Census Bureau reported that the value of the widely followed new orders for manufactured durable goods decreased by $1.2 billion or 0.5 percent to $260.1 billion in October, after September’s new orders were revised but still...

Commenter and Blogger RJS at Focus on Fracking and MarketWatch 666 brought up the past history of US SPR oil releases and the impact on oil prices in the Comments section. Since 1990, each time releases (SPR) have been made, there has been a countering reduction of oil by OPEC which could include Russia this time. Taken from Tyler Durbin’s Zero Hedge post entitled “Saudis, Russians Consider Pausing Oil Production Increases In Retaliation To...

The consumer spending spree continued in October, New Deal democrat Real personal income and spending held up well throughout the pandemic, due to a vigorous government response. With special benefits ended, the question has been: will they hold up? This month, the answer was a definite “yes.”In nominal terms, personal income increased 0.5% and spending rose 1.3%. In real terms, personal income (blue in the graph below) declined -0.2%, but real...