New home sales: a bright spot in the housing indicators  – by New Deal democrat New home sales are very noisy, and are heavily revised, which is why I pay more attention to single family housing permits. But they do have one important value: they are frequently the first housing indicator to turn at both tops and bottoms. And it increasingly looks like new home sales have already made their bottom for this cycle. In January they rose a...

I am late in posting “In-Box” due to other things going on at home. Talk of Healthcare? I fractured a tooth. It now has to be replaced with a bridge. I did not like the idea of a Sears Best drilling a hole in my jaw-bone for a stud to mount a tooth. Next up an eye operation which Medicare will cover. Then down to the VA to make contact again. This week there were a lot of interesting subjects to read. So many of them, I could double the length of...

You see it all the time in studies. “We controlled for…” And then the list starts … The more things you can control for, the stronger your study is — or, at least, the stronger your study seems. Controls give the feeling of specificity, of precision. But sometimes, you can control for too much. Sometimes you end up controlling for the thing you’re trying to measure … An example is research around the gender wage gap, which tries to control for so many things that it ends up...

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from Lars Syll It is widely recognized but often tacitly neglected that all statistical approaches have intrinsic limitations that affect the degree to which they are applicable to particular contexts … John Maynard Keynes was perhaps the first to provide a concise and comprehensive summation of the key issues in his critique of Jan Tinbergen’s book Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories … Keynes’s intervention has, of course, become the basis of the “Tinbergen debate” and is a...

Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is widely acclaimed as the person who vanquished and conquered inflation in the early 1980s. By implementing a monetary policy inspired from Monetarist prescriptions, he is thought as having restored the ability of the Fed to control the money supply and to bring down price instability. Yes, the economy suffered but the pain was worth it. Volcker received many accolades with Chairman Alan Greenspan considering him the “most effective chairman in the...

China criticizes the distributional structure of the US economy. China appears to be becoming more aggressive in the information war that the US has dominated until recently.ECNSRising Economic Polarization in the United States: Truth and FactsXinhua

Steven Grumbine is the Founder, President and CEO of Real Progressives and the host of the weekly podcast Macro & Cheese. Website: https://realprogressives.org/

Lots of folks telling me to just stick to MMT and STFU with all the Buddhist sh*t.