Det bidde en tummetott — det nya finanspolitiska ramverket I Starta Pressarna fortsätter debatten om det finanspolitiska ramverket och behovet av stora framtida investeringar i infrastruktur, bostäder, försvar och energiomställning. I det här avsnittet vädrar Daniel Suhonen, Enna Gerin och Max Jerneck ett berättigat missnöje över den överenskommelse som regeringen i samförstånd med SD, C och socialdemokraterna slutit om ett nytt finanspolitiskt...
Read More »Blog Archives
Despite Helene, housing permits and starts stabilized in September; but construction based yellow flag remains
– by New Deal democrat Much of the data that is being released, like yesterday’s jobless claims data, has to be viewed with an asterisk after it, because of hurricane disruptions. As an addendum to yesterday’s industrial production report, I failed to mention that the BEA that “the effects of two hurricanes subtracted an estimated 0.3 percent” from the total. Even with that increase, production would have been unchanged and manufacturing...
Read More »William Baumol On Marx
This is more for my commonplace book. The first two quotations are part of a symposium with Morishima and Samuelson: "This paper will suggest that the meaning of the relationship between values and prices described in Capital has been widely misunderstood. Commentators as eminent as Mrs. Robinson and Professor Samuelson have sought in the transformation discussion issues which Karl Marx never meant it to contain. Writers on 'the transformation problem' since L. Bortkiewicz have...
Read More »Homelessness 101
[unable to retrieve full-text content]I recently delivered my Homelessness 101 workshop in both English and French. All course material is available free of charge at this link: https://nickfalvo.ca/courses/
Read More »Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others
I’m reading an article about Kamala Harris in the October 21st New Yorker. This paragraph caught my eye:“When Harris talks of the origins of her interest in government, she lingers on a moment from her time in Montreal: a friend from Westmount High, Wanda Kagan, was being physically and sexually abused at home, and Harris’s mother took her in. “A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her,” Harris has said. In...
Read More »Decoding Medicare Advantage
Decoding Medicare Advantage by Andrew Sprung xpostfactoid Can STAT’s exposure of UHC’s exhortations to goose Medicare Advantage enrollees’ risk scores spur action to reduce MA overpayment? Load these Codes It is beyond reasonable doubt that the federal government’s payments to Medicare Advantage plans are grossly inflated by the plans’ gaming of the program’s risk adjustment system, designed to deter plans from cherry-picking health...
Read More »This Weeks Covid spiel includes current details on variant proportions
– by R.J. Sigmund Most of the demographic indicators of this summer’s Covid wave continued to recede rapidly in this week’s reports, and wastewater levels of the virus, the most definitive indicator of infections, have fallen to “low.” Among the CDC’s “early indicators” “test positivity”, or the percentage of tests for Covid that were positive, fell to 7.7% during the week ending October 5th, down from 9.5% positive during the week ending...
Read More »How to deal with inflation?
In Europe (the Euro area, to be precise), both unemployment and inflation are down, according to Eurostat,. Which, again, shows that the Phillips curve, a crucial concept behind neoclassical macroeconomic thinking that assumes a more or less stable negative relation between unemployment and inflation (high unemployment will bring inflation down), is not the place to go when predicting or analysing inflation. Sometimes, this relation is specified as a relation between wage increases and...
Read More »Real retail sales increased in September, but concern – and their yellow flag – continue
– by New Deal democrat A periodic reminder, real retail sales is one of my favorite economic indicators, because it tells us so much about the state of the consumer, and since consumption leads employment, it is a short leading indicator for that as well. In September retail sales in August rose 0.4% on a nominal basis. After adjusting for inflation, they rose 0.3%. The below graph norms both real retail sales (dark blue) and the similar...
Read More »Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization – G.17
Current Release October 17, 2024 Market Groups The major market groups posted mixed results in September. Among consumer goods, the production of durables decreased 0.7 percent. In contrast, the index for nondurables increased 0.5 percent, boosted by a 1.7 percent increase in energy goods. The output of business equipment declined 3.5 percent in September, weighed down by a sharp drop of 14.2 percent in the production of transit equipment...
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