November 15, 2023 . . . Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) scolding his colleagues: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. One! Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides, ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”  In contrast,...

If you have been following NDd, you will note one of the biggest issues with the economy is supply chain. Most notably shortages of raw material, components, and finished products. Similar occurred in 2008 and my own belief is this is a recurrence of similar. I believe much of this could have been prevented. Beyongd that remark, I will let NDd tell you how falling costs impacts the economy. Real retail sales consistent with continued slow growth,...

House politics today as most Repubs and Dems support the House funding bill. Democrat Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and Mike Quigley of Illinois voted against the passage of the House Speaker Mike Johnson’s stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown. With the two Dems, Ninety-three Republicans voted against it also. The bill passed. A similar bill as what former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy supported. The Democratic House leadership,...

I know Dean Moore from a German Company in upstate New York where we both worked. Great area to be. the Germans operated like they had a board up their backs. Working in Germany was fun and I got to explore on weekends on their dime. As it was, I left after three years. Dean followed a year or so later. Dean Moore is vice president of work/life at St. John’s, a full-service senior care provider with options that range from independent living to...

Fiscal flows are everything. Pay attention to these quarterly trends. 

The hidden force.

I have just finished reading the excellent new book by Branko Milanovic. It’s called “Visions of Inequality” and is a tour through the history of economics since the days of Quesnay. More specifically it takes a look at how a handful of prominent economists have treated the topic of inequality. Most of you will have covered this territory before, but examining how people such as Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto and Kuznets discussed the problem of distribution is not only an...

NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO, a New York fund manager named Warren Mosler noticed a discrepancy between what he saw day-to-day in his interactions with the Federal Reserve and the way almost all academic economists write about money. The way they write, you would think currency-issuing governments need to tax before they can spend — Mosler noticed it is the other way around.Getting this wrong is not trivial. It biases policy narratives. It misleads politicians into thinking that there is something...

Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson and David Schmeidler (2022) describe a practice that … is not uncommon among theorists: “[O]ne may suggest a model with a descriptive interpretation in mind, but, when facing an aggressive audience, one might take a step back and rather than promoting the model as an explanation of a real-life phenomenon, present it as a ‘proof of concept’ or ‘merely an exercise’ in testing the scope of the standard paradigm. (p. 7)“ Think...

It’s Wednesday, and today I discuss the latest US inflation data, which shows a significant annual decline in the inflation rate with housing still prominent. But for reasons I discuss, we can expect the housing inflation to fall in the coming months. I also discuss how on-going fiscal ignorance allows the Australian government to avoid investing in much-needed fast rail infrastructure which would solve many problems that are now reducing societal well-being. And then some of the best guitar...