Another Message Board Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. I’ve moved my irregular email news from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read it here. You can also follow me on Mastodon here I’m also trying out Substack as a blogging platform. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

A geopolitical economic explanation of China's moves with respect to Ukraine and Russia.Strategic Culture Foundation (sanctioned by the US Treasury Department)What China is really playing at in UkrainePepe EscobarAlso at SCFA Russian view of what's coming.The Last Offensive of the Kiev RegimeDavor Slobodanovich VuyachichRT — Question More (Russian state-sponsored media)Zelensky’s top adviser issues threat to China

I got to this article about the Home Value Index Report after reading an Insider’s “The Fight Over Airbnbs Is Now Descending on Small American Cities,” businessinsider.com, Dan Latu. The article is about Airbnb rentals in Bozeman, Montana. Bozeman residents are trying to figure out what to do as it is driving up the prices of homes and the resulting taxes. It all started with the pandemic and people escaping the more populated areas to Bozeman a...

Banks preying on university students

from Peter Radford I have been reminded by Tyler Cowen of Bryan Caplan’s simplistic theory of left and right.  It’s short and to the point.  Leftists are, he says, “anti-market”. He is wrong. Leftists are anti-market obsession.  They are anti-market fanaticism.  They are anti-market worship.  Specifically, they are opposed to the form of idealization used to articulate “the market” in economics. There’s a difference.  And I assume Bryan Caplan knows as much. There has been a recent...

Attending economics seminars — a total waste of time! Visiting economics conferences and seminars, the sessions usually start with the presentation of mathematical-statistical models building on assumptions somewhat analogous to “let us assume that people are green and descending from Mars” — and then long technical discussions follow on how good these models are at making us better understand contemporary societies and economies. Yours truly finds it...

 Weekly Indicators for April 24 – 28 at Seeking Alpha – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Several important short leading indicators rallied this week. In particular, the stock market seems to think the worst is over (for the moment!). At the same time, several important coincident indicators of taxation and employment are on the cusp of rolling over again. As usual, clicking over and reading will...

GAO: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: USPS Should Plan for Potential Workplace Charging – Save the Post Office Introduction Part of the plan as referred to in Steve Hutkins’ “EVs and S&DCs: USPS says you can’t have one without the other” was to have EV charging capabilities at the local post offices which would be available to the Post Office, USPS workers and also the public. As provided by Congress, funding was targeted for all three...

Trygve Haavelmo — with the completion (in 1958) of the twenty-fifth volume of Econometrica — assessed the role of econometrics in the advancement of economics, and although mainly positive of the “repair work” and “clearing-up work” done, he also found some grounds for despair: We have found certain general principles which would seem to make good sense. Essentially, these principles are based on the reasonable idea that, if an economic model is in fact “correct” or “true,” we...

Private Debt: The Crisis Catalyst