Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Economists, History, Macroeconomics, Taxation on Apr 20th, 2014
Readers who are following the adulation of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century do not need much information about the book. One major theme of the book is that if the rate of return on “capital” exceeds the overall rate of return in the entire economy, then it follows that the rich and elderly gain in […]
Posted in Central Planning, Financial Institutions, Fun Facts, Macroeconomics, Money on Apr 16th, 2014
If you read the Fed’s consolidated financial statements for fun and take them seriously, you would learn that the Fed’s current leverage ratio is … … … 77:1. It’s just a number of course.
Posted in Macroeconomics on Feb 3rd, 2014
From an article forwarded to me today: In today’s COUNTY, oil and gas account for 75% of all exports, compared with 67% in 1980. Although COUNTRY no longer buys grain from OTHER COUNTRY, as it did in the 1980s, 45% of what Countrians buy today is imported. Walk around a department store in central CITY, […]
Posted in Macroeconomics on Jan 7th, 2014
Arnold Kling has this today: Larry Summers writes. [we need] policies that restore a situation where reasonable growth and reasonable interest rates can coincide. To start, this means ending the disastrous trends toward ever less government spending and employment each year The CBO wrote, By 2038, CBO projects, federal spending would increase to 26 percent […]
Posted in Environment, Macroeconomics, Price System, Standards of Living on Jan 3rd, 2014
Humans are to electricity like fish are to water … or something close to it. Electricity has become so vital to our lives, yet so reliable, that we hardly think about it, perhaps even as we pay our monthly electricity bills. reflecting on our reliance upon electricity may lead one into a paradox, and it […]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Economics Problems, Macroeconomics on Nov 15th, 2013
A major complaint levied against markets is that unless we have strong regulation of what can and cannot be sold, and under what conditions, that markets end up “commodifying” everything. Here is one such argument. Part of the difficulty with addressing claims of commodification is that the term has different meanings, and it’s not clear […]
Posted in Central Planning, Macroeconomics, Politics on Oct 15th, 2013
Gosh I hate being a retired blogger. Without being pulled too far into a semantic swamp, let me assure our readers that the only way for the US Government to default formally (ignore that inflation might be considered a regularly occurring default by some) in two days is for the US Government to WANT to […]
Posted in growth, Macroeconomics on May 31st, 2013
Tyler Cowen uses this as evidence for his view that “We are not as wealthy as we thought we were” (which I often agree with): From Ylan Q. Mui at The Washington Post: American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth lost during the recession, according to a new analysis from the Federal […]
Posted in Macroeconomics on May 20th, 2013
That question is a bit on the dramatic size, but I found this paper to be fascinating: Adjusting Measures of Economic Output for Health: Is the Business Cycle Countercyclical? by Mark L. Egan, Casey B. Mulligan, Tomas J. Philipson – NBER Working Paper #19058 Many national accounts of economic output and prosperity, such as gross domestic product […]
Posted in Macroeconomics on May 9th, 2013
Tyler Cowen links to this Matt Yglesias post from yesterday. The “money” shot is this one: There are two obvious points the author is making here. First is that most “public investment” happens at the state and local level. While I do respect that this is an underappreciated and misunderstood fact, it is our own […]
