Oil and gas producers are diversifying their funding sources.Energy asset securitization is a new type of funding that is quicking gaining in popularity. Oil and gas securitization offerings could be beneficial to both investors and producers, Daniel Allison, energy finance partner with law firm Sidley Austin LLP, said. OilpriceA New Type Of Oil And Gas Funding Is BoomingTsvetana Paraskova

See the comment that accompanies the cartoon. (It's short.) China is taking off the gloves.ECNS (Chinese official English news service)Comicomment: U.S. unilateralism, trade protectionism harm global tradeSee also at ECNSChinese cities issue vouchers to prop up consumer spending

Just finished “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the making of a postwar stalemate” by Mary Sarotte. The book was recommended to me by Bruce Cochrane. It is an excellent insight into current events in Ukraine today.The title comes from the assurance given by then-Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev that German reunification would mean “not one inch eastward” in NATO expansion. This phrase has inspired much finger-pointing by Russia...

from Dean Baker The idea of industrial policy has taken on almost a mystical quality for many progressives. The idea is that it is somehow new and different from what we had been doing, and if we had been doing industrial policy for the last half-century, everything would be better. This has led to widespread applause on the left for aspects of President Biden’s agenda that can be considered industrial policy, like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the infrastructure...

Tyler Cowen points us to YouChat, a new AI chatbot, that as far as I can see after studying this carefully for 15 seconds is supposed to be more up to date than the OpenAI bot and integrated with a search engine which naturally makes it the next new thing and presumably worth billions of dollars to potential investors. In the interest of being scrupulously fair, I decided to give YouChat a chance to answer the same question that OpenAI fumbled...

A Merry Christmas (personal) Amanda (32), Linnea (23), Sebastian (29), David (32), Tora (29), and Hedda (9). It is great to be able to have all sons and daughters home over the Christmas holidays.

[embedded content]Mary Filippo's "My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics"Discussion between Unlearning Economics and Blair Fix An article in Current Affairs on "The death of 'Econ 101'" A symposium in Contributions to Political Economy John Eatwell, Economic Theory and Empirical Evidence Theodore Mariolis and Panagiotos Veltsistas, Zero measure Sraffian economies: new insights from actual input-output tables Jacobo Ferrer Hernándex and Luis Daniel Torres-González, Some recent...

Real personal income and spending hold up (thank you, lower gas prices!) but still consistent with onset of recession This morning’s report on personal income and spending for November shows why I pay more attention to real retail sales as a forecasting tool. First, to the data: personal income increased nominally by 0.3% in November, while nominal spending increased only 0.1%. Since the deflator for the month was 0.1%, that means real income...

Durable goods orders appear to have peaked  [Note: I’ll post about personal income and spending, as well as new home sales, later.] I normally don’t pay much attention to the monthly durable goods report, but this morning’s report for November appears significant. That’s because durable goods spending has been one of the few short leading indicators to have continued to improve – until now. Here’s the long term view: New factory orders...

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