Credit conditions in Q2 improved, and are typical of an economy having come *out* of a recession, not going in to one  – by New Deal democrat The Senior Loan Officer Survey, the premier quarterly measure of the loose- or tight-ness of bank lending, was published yesterday for Q2. And since lending conditions are a long leading indicator for the economy, and several of the metrics contained in this release have a good and lengthy track record,...

Today is the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. I grew up in Oak Ridge, TN, a city that was founded in secret for the purpose of enriching uranium for atomic bombs. The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium fission atomic bomb. The idea of immolating thousands of civilians was not novel at that point. See, e.g., the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings. Hiroshima was certainly a valid military target.One counterfactual argument is that, had the nuclear bombings...

Finally, some or most of Congress may do something to Rein in SCOTUS and the rogue Justices. The question here being can they nullify Congress’s act in some fashion. No Kings Act WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation Thursday reaffirming that presidents do not have immunity for criminal actions, an attempt to reverse the Supreme Court’s landmark decision last month. Schumer’s No Kings Act would...

Paul Davidson (1930-2024) In Memoriam Paul Davidson, the co-founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE) and a leading Post Keynesian economist, died on June 20, 2024, in Chicago. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, on October 23, 1930, about a year after the Great Crash of 1929. He was a staunch defender of the importance of John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas, he insisted, differed fundamentally from those of the Neo-Keynesians who came to dominate...

The advent of CAR-T and CRISPR technologies are set to revolutionize cancer and genetic disease therapies, respectively. But with great hope comes great costs. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 100,000 people in the US have sickle cell disease, making it the most prevalent inherited blood disorder. Remarkably, the new gene therapies offer very promising early efficacy: exa-cel and lovo-cel demonstrated 93.5%...

Blog How the Bank of England is wasting billions in public money boosting banking sector profits The Treasury is predicted to cover £100bn worth of loses at the Bank of England in the next five years - there are better ways we could spend this money. By Dominic Caddick 06 August 2024...

by Joyce Vance Civil Discourse Tonight, the reporting is that Vice President Harris’ choice of running mate is down to Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. Although Shapiro has a somewhat higher public profile because of his work taking on Trump and election deniers in court when he was the state’s attorney general, Walz has closed that gap in recent days. The more liberal of the two, he recently offered...

Last Friday’s news was dominated by the ‘biggest IT outage in history’, as   a bug in a routine software update cascaded into a global crisis.  Millions of computers were knocked out, thousands of flights  cancelled,  hospital operations  postponed,  television channels went off the air, payments systems  crashed,  supply chains  froze. In  short the digital foundations of our civilisation were  shaken  for hours and in some cases days. There was no mention that I could see  of...

In his interesting opinion article (Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI, 27 July), Ed Newton-Rex misses one of the most serious concerns about artificial intelligence: its surveillance potential. Governments have always spied on their subjects/citizens: technology multiplies their powers of spying. In his novel 1984, George Orwell had the authorities install a two-way telescreen system in every party member’s home, and in all...

Sir, William Hague poses a false alternative: letting Russia win or allowing Ukraine to fire western-supplied missiles deep in Russian territory. There is better way: a negotiated peace, involving neither a Ukrainian defeat nor military escalation. This requires a recognition that Ukraine has already won its most important victory. Putin expected to be in Kyiv within a week: Ukraine, with our help, has made sure he will never get there. Some sacrifice of territory in return for real, not...