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Category Archives: Economics

Non Sequiturs anyone?

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

This morning's Times tells us that in Denmark McDonalds pays $20.00 an hour. Not, of course, because it wants to, but because it has to in order to do business in Denmark. It's employees can actually live on what they make working there. An amazing thing! The downside is that MacDonalds can't make the same […]

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The Fed gives a gift to American corporations

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

This is a bit of a mashup from some recent posts from the ever valuable Wall Street on Parade blog. Today's Fed may be more consumer friendly than it has been in the past 30 years, but that's apparently not saying much. The Fed has announced rules requiring the big banks to hold liquid assets, […]

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Money for nothing

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

I'm not an economist, never having progressed beyond the intro course in college, though I have been trying to educate myself. I've often expressed what I can only call my intuition that all the Wall Street folks are doing at this stage is skimming money out of the economic system without providing anything of value […]

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Yet another book report

Friday, June 27, 2014

For a number of reasons, blogging has been infrequent here lately. I offer my humble apologies for depriving the world of my reactions to such events as the Cochran victory. Amazingly, the world appears to be getting on, but I know how much I've been missed. In those snatches of time I've had available to […]

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Good news/Bad news

Sunday, June 1, 2014

If Joe Costello, writing here at Naked Capitalism is correct, and I suspect that he is, the oil industry may be in for a period of decline: Over the last year, some deep truths about oil and the oil industry have begun to bubble to the surface. Not necessarily that they were ever hard to […]

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There are taxes, and then there are taxes

Monday, April 21, 2014

David Atkins points out that the effective tax rate in the U.S. is the third lowest in the developed world. He is taking issue with the right wingers who are constantly bemoaning our high taxes, and, in that sense, his rebuttal is spot on. But in a larger sense, I think the jury is still […]

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What secular stagnation means to me

Saturday, February 1, 2014

I have been reading a lot about secular stagnation recently, but I confess I didn't really understand the concept until I read Paul Krugman's column in the Times Friday morning. Now I think it's clear: You may or may not have heard that there’s a big debate among economists about whether we face “secular stagnation.” […]

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Banking going postal?

Thursday, January 30, 2014

I mentioned a short time ago that I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's Bully Pulpit. I'm not still reading it. I'm not that slow. One thing I was interested in was the fact that both TR and William Howard Taft advocating postal banking, i.e., allowing people to open savings accounts at post offices. It was […]

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Defining Normal

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Dean Baker has a lot to say about an article in this morning's Times about the current housing market, which, as he points out, seems to be written from the perspective of the mortgage lending industry. Dean quotes this statement from the article: “Tighter lending standards are shutting out close to 12.5 million consumers who […]

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What could go wrong, bitcoin edition

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Okay, I'm not an economist, so I can't give you chapter and verse about why this does not bode well, but it seems to me that packaging derivatives to protect bitcoin investors just can't end well: Coinbase now handles bitcoin transactions for more than 19,000 businesses and 750,000 individuals. The tiny San Francisco startup offers […]

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