Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (March 26, 2019)
Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: Tuesday April 9, 2019, 9:45-11:00 AM
Hoisted from the Archives: Thoughts on David Frum's Excellent Review of Adam Tooze
Live at Project Syndicate: The Fed Board Unmoored
Shelly Hagan and Wei Lu: San Francisco's `Super Rich' Lead a Widening U.S. Wealth Divide: "The Income Gap Is Getting Worse in American Cities. U.S. income gap between top 5% and middle 20% grew by 118,000. Boise City, Idaho, and Knoxville, Tennessee, have robust gaps: The tech hub’s 'super-rich versus middle-class' gap swelled by $118,000 to $529,500 over the past five years, as the top 5 percent of households earned $632,310 in 2017, compared with $102,785 for the middle class, according to the Bloomberg analysis of U.S. Census data...
Richard Samans: Better Labor Standards Must Underpin the Future of Work: "As technology and deregulation continue to shape the labor market, maintaining strong worker protections is as important as ever...
Hess Chung and Eric Engen (20134): Identifying the Sources of the Unexpectedly Weak Economic Recovery Using the FRB/US Model
Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo: The Economic Lives of the Poor
Daniel Alpert: What the Federal Reserve Got Totally Wrong about Inflation and Interest Rate Policy: Getting Real About Rents
Jared Bernstein: On the Economy
Katrin Gödker, Peiran Jiao, and Paul Smeets: Investor Memory: "Self-serving memory bias... distorts beliefs and drives investment choices. Subjects who previously invested in a risky stock are more likely to remember positive investment outcomes and less likely to remember negative outcomes. In contrast, subjects who did not invest but merely observed the investment outcomes do not have this memory bias. Importantly, subjects do not adjust their behavior to account for the fallibility of their memory...
Mark Thoma: Links (3/24/19)
Ben Thompson: Apple’s Services Event: "The problem, though, is that there will never be a product like the iPhone again; Apple may have found its product future (good for developers and customers), but its financial future is less certain (not so good for Wall Street)...
Data For Progress: A Green New Deal. New Consensus: Green New Deal
Menzie Chinn: "Stop Stephen Moore from being appointed to the Fed. Here is a non-exhaustive recounting of Moore’s reign of error...
Marina Hyde: Get Set for Brexit: Indicative Day–The One Where the Grand Wizards Turn on Each Other: "On Sunday it was all looking so good for the Brexit ultras. Then came Monday, and that parliamentary vote.... Like all initiatives handled by Oliver Letwin since the 1980s, it promises to go spectacularly wrong in ways we haven’t even thought of yet, but let’s pretend otherwise before the shitstorm gets properly under way on Wednesday...
Catherine Rampell: The Op-Ed that Got Stephen Moore His Fed Nomination Is Based on Two Major Falsehoods: "Trump has nominated to the world’s most powerful central bank a guy who has trouble telling whether prices are going up or down, and struggles to remember how the most famous Fed chair in history successfully stamped out inflation. But hey, Republican senators still seem keen on him because 'the establishment' keeps pointing out how inept he is...
Nick Timiraos: @NickTimiraos: "Ben Sasse supports Moore: 'Steve’s nomination has thrown the card-carrying members of the Beltway establishment into a tizzy, and that says little about Steve and his belief in American ingenuity, but a lot about central planners’ devotion to groupthink'...
Catherine Rampell: Stephen Moore Could Inflict More Long-Term Damage than Any of Trump’s Other Nominations: "President Trump has made a lot of ill-advised nominations. But perhaps no single choice could inflict more long-term damage than the one he announced Friday: Stephen Moore, Trump’s pick to join the Federal Reserve Board...
Jo Walton (2010): The Suck Fairy
Martin Cahill: A Stunning Debut: Arkady Martine’s "A Memory Called Empire"
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose: @IIPPUCL_: "Watch as @bankofengland Chief Economist Andy Haldane explores 10 monetary myths that will help present and future generations to rethink and reframe the way we organise our economies, our financial systems and our societies https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Ul0pTVl8l98...
Paul Krugman: Trump’s Kakistocracy Is Also a Hackistocracy: "Trump said he planned to nominate Stephen Moore for the Fed’s Board of Governors. Moore is manifestly, flamboyantly unqualified for the position. But there’s a story here that goes deeper than Moore, or even Trump; it’s about the whole GOP’s preference for hucksters over experts, even partisan experts...
Cathy Young: Who’s Afraid of The Bulwark?: "The conservative media wars heat up—but miss the point.... I don’t know what The Bulwark’s endgame is, but right now, it’s among a deplorably small number of outlets that get high marks for intellectual diversity and integrity. That should be good enough...
Lukasz Rachel and Larry Summers: Responding to some of the Critiques of Our Paper on Secular Stagnation and Fiscal Policy: "Prefer more reliance on reasonably managed fiscal policies as a response to secular stagnation: government borrowing at negative real rates and investing seems very attractive in a world where there are many projects with high social returns...
The very sharp Mohamed A. El-Erian misses one important thing here: almost always, recessions are much deeper than any naive computation of the size of the initial shock minus the sum of monetary and fiscal offset would predict. Why? Because businesses and investors are forward-looking, and take recession signals seriously. As Tim Duy says: everyone's "recession indicator... probability models... [are] raising red flags". It's a multiple-equiibrium thing. So while a recession in the next year is not certain and may not be probable it is not unlikely: Mohamed A. El-Erian: Inverted Yield Curve Doesn't Necessarily Mean Recession Is Nigh: "This rather benign economic outlook conflicts with the traditional signal of an inverted curve for four main reasons.... [1] Europe... puts downward pressure on U.S. yields.... [2] The Fed... a remarkable and rapid U-turn.... Other segments of the bond market are not signaling a major economic slowdown.... The erosion in inflationary expectations may... [be a] realization that many of the underlying drivers are structural.... This curve inversion is unlikely to be the traditional signal of a U.S. recession...
Brad Setser: Why China's Incomplete Macroeconomic Adjustment Makes China 2025 a Bigger Risk: "China... wants to 'localize' the production of the bulk of the high tech goods that its economy needs... Made in China 2025... a mix of subsidies (some disguised, as they flow through state-backed investment funds and the financial sectors) and 'Buy China' preferences.... Losses... China is good at both hiding them—and, well, absorbing what at the time seems like large losses as an inevitable cost of its rapid growth. The usual argument against such a mix of industrial policy and protectionism is that it just won’t work. A country that subsidizes its industries ends up with inefficient industries.... But China, is, to use Philip Pan’s phrase, the state that failed to fail...
Robert Hutton: Indicative Votes: How Parliament Will Try to Change Brexit: "Members of Parliament will have put forward proposals they think should be voted on and it’s up to Bercow to choose which go forward.... At 7 p.m., Bercow will draw proceedings to a close and announce the vote. This won’t be like the usual House of Commons votes, where MPs walk through different lobbies to express their views. Instead, they’ll be given a piece of paper listing the options, and asked to vote Aye or No on each one. They’ll have half an hour.... Counting the indicative votes will probably take around an hour, and it will be up to Bercow whether he interrupts the government debate to announce the result, or waits until later. So some time before 10 p.m. The results will show how many MPs voted for and against each motion, and what happens next depends on that. Under Letwin’s proposals, Parliament will next have control of its own agenda on Monday April 1. That could be used to narrow options further, or to order the government to pursue a particular course of action...
Charles Pierce: Khalid Shaikh Mohammad Tapes Went Unreviewed in Lead-Up to 9/11 in Latest Bush Administration Blunder: "'Terry McDermott, co-author of “The Hunt for KSM,” said his research found that United States satellites “randomly scooped up” calls between Mr. Mohammed and an alleged deputy, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. “The N.S.A. intercepted calls but didn’t listen to them or translate them until after 9/11,” he said. “Afterward, they went through this stuff and found out what it was.”' It is here where we remind everyone that one of the first things John Ashcroft did after being named attorney general by President C-Plus Augustus was to reorient the Justice Department's priorities toward porn and busting Tommy Chong for weed... how clustered was the fck that was the intelligence community... in the summer of 2001... how desperate were the efforts to cover up all of the above, and more, in the wake of the attacks themselves...
