More on the sharp deceleration in YoY house price gains, and the Fed’s chasing the phantom menace  – by New Deal democrat Since there is no big economic news again today, let me fill in a little more detail on house prices through January, reported yesterday, vs. CPI for shelter. Here is the monthly % change for the past 18 months for Owners Equivalent Rent in the CPI (blue), vs. the Case Shiller national index (gold) and the FHFA purchase...

As the world reeled in shock at the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another bank quietly went under. On Sunday 12th March, the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC announced that all SVB depositors, whether insured or not, would have access to their funds from Monday. And then they added:  We are also announcing a similar systemic risk exception for Signature Bank, New York, which was closed today by its state chartering authority.Signature Bank NY's state chartering...

Just finished reading “Black Earth: The Holocaust as history and warning” by Timothy Snyder. It is a detailed account of the Holocaust, as well as an effort to abstract lessons from this history for our time.Like his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder’s “Black Earth” makes for painful reading. As the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew and the son of a Jew, I would have been targeted in the Holocaust had I been in the wrong place. I had read several histories of...

from Lars Syll In a recent essay titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization” and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial middle class in America. And many of these working-class communities have been hit hard by Chinese...

 While this post is specific to Australia, the reasons for the recent spike in "inflation" are not unique to Australia. The inflation that is now turning out to be transitory was not the result of a wage-price spiral as central bank models assume. Rather, it was a consequence of supply shocks owing to the pandemic followed by sanctions in response to the conflict in Ukraine. Now that supply chains are beginning to function again or have been replaced or substituted, the inflation metrics are...

YoY house price gains continue to decline  – by New Deal democrat Today is a travel day so I have to keep this brief.  On a monthly basis for January, prices rose 0.2% as measured by the FHFA house price index. But because that was far less of an increase in January last year, YoY house prices as measured by the FHFA index declined to +5.3%. This implies that by January next year OER as measured in the CPI will only be up about 2.1% – well...

Sanford-Fairview merger is a symptom of a larger problem, MinnPost, Kip Sullivan. Minnesota has a hospital merger problem. But it didn’t begin last fall when Sanford Health and Fairview Health Services announced their intention to merge. It began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s in response to mergers of unprecedented size among health insurance companies. By the early 2000s, Minnesota’s hospital sector had been transformed into a few...

I have heard of this. Have not used it. But, I wonder what will happen to our own creativity. We humans are supposed to be a curious, thoughtful, and an intelligent specious. We do the unexpected in different environments and situations which makes us unique. No two of us are alike or react the same. “It is a spectacular scientific puzzle that human beings are the sole species that seems to be able to think and feel beyond the limits of the scale...