Analysis Topic: Economic Trends Analysis
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Friday, July 03, 2015
Greece's So-Called Austerity / Economics / Eurozone Debt Crisis
By: Steve_H_Hanke
It's hard to find anything written or spoken about Greece that doesn't contain a great deal of hand wringing about the alleged austerity -- brutal fiscal austerity -- that the Greek government has been forced to endure at the hands of the so-called troika. This is Alice in Wonderland economics. It supports my 95 percent rule: Ninety-five percent of what you read about economics and finance is either wrong or irrelevant.
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Wednesday, July 01, 2015
Greece's Crisis and Its Bloated Government / Economics / Government Spending
By: Steve_H_Hanke
It's hard to find anything written or spoken about Greece that doesn't contain a great deal of hand wringing about the alleged austerity - brutal fiscal austerity -- that the Greek government has been forced to endure at the hands of the so-called troika. This is Alice in Wonderland economics. It supports my 95 percent rule: 95 percent of what you read about economics and finance is either wrong or irrelevant.
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Tuesday, June 30, 2015
China Takes A Big Step To Spur Economic Growth / Economics / China Economy
By: AnyOption
After a strong end of last year for Chinese markets, there was a bit of a reversal in the first quarter of 2015; and it has caught the attention of Chinese monetary policy makers. In an effort to spur economic growth, the People's Bank of China has made big changes to monetary policy in the country. Today, we'll talk about what those changes are and how they're likely to help, as well as what we can expect to see from China's markets moving forward. So, let's get right to it.Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Dumping the Euro Isn’t a Cure-All: Easy Money Lets Governments Avoid Free-Market Reforms / Economics / Euro-Zone
By: Frank_Hollenbeck
The Greek drama continues to unfold with the risk of “grexit” becoming increasingly likely. Yet, a large majority of the Greek people want to keep the euro. This, however, would require the Greek government to live within its means — something it has not been able to do for decades. With anti-austerity parties gaining strength continent wide, Greece may be the first, but not the last, to leave.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
The Fed’s Failed Efforts to Right the U.S. Economic Ship / Economics / US Economy
By: Harry_Dent
Rodney Johnson writes:
According to a recent Federal Reserve report, American wealth clocked in at $99 trillion in the first quarter of 2015, setting a new record. More than two-thirds of this is in paper assets, with the remaining third in housing and other assets.While the value of all consumer real estate has yet to eclipse its previous peak set in 2006, the equity and debt markets have ramped up over the past six years… even as economic activity remains sluggish and wages stagnant. This probably has a little bit to do with the Fed printing over $4 trillion and force-feeding all the money to the banking system. Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Gold and Economic Inequality / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Mark_Thornton
Inequality is a top news items for 2015 driven largely by the Baltimore riots, the minimum wage debate, Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and now the entry of socialist Bernie Sanders into the race for US president.
The Left wants more welfare, better schools, free college, enhanced job training, and more. The Right, in contrast, wants welfare reform, charter schools, tax reform — not to be confused with tax cuts — and use of the negative income tax.
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Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Ukraine's Soaring Inflation / Economics / Inflation
By: Steve_H_Hanke
I estimate the current annual implied inflation rate in Ukraine to be 92 percent. This is the world's second-highest inflation rate, far lower than Venezuela's 480 percent but slightly higher than Syria's 75 percent.
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Monday, June 15, 2015
China - The People’s Republic of Debt / Economics / China
By: John_Mauldin
It wasn’t that many centuries ago that China was the absolute economic center of the world. That center gravitated to Europe and then towards North America and has now begun moving back to China. My colleague Jawad Mian provided this chart showing the evolution of Earth’s economic center of gravity from 2000 years ago to a few years and into the future:
Monday, June 15, 2015
Consumers Not Following Orders / Economics / US Economy
By: James_Quinn
Last week the government reported personal income and spending for April. After months of blaming non-existent consumer spending on cold weather, shockingly occurring during the Winter, the captured mainstream media pundits, Ivy League educated Wall Street economist lackeys, and Keynesian loving money printers at the Fed have run out of propaganda to explain why Americans are not spending money they don’t have. The corporate mainstream media is now visibly angry with the American people for not doing what the Ivy League propagated Keynesian academic models say they should be doing.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Minimum Wages Hikes Are Actually Tax Hikes / Economics / Wages
By: Barry_M_Ferguson
The US federal minimum wage is getting a lot of attention these days. I have no doubt that the current $7.25 per hour minimum wage will be raised soon because american intellect has been diseased and destroyed by a Pelosi-like infestation of terminal ignorance. Americans are no longer capable of examining a problem fully to understand the correct solution. Sound bits, regardless of their relation to truth, have replaced logic.
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Friday, June 12, 2015
The Fallacies of GDP Economic Statistics / Economics / Economic Statistics
By: Alasdair_Macleod
The common error of confusing growth with progress goes largely unnoticed, though it permeates all macroeconomic analysis. There is no better example of this mistake than the fallacies behind the interpretation of Gross Domestic Product. GDP is the market value of all final goods and services in a given year. As such, it is only an accounting identity reflecting the quantity of money in the economy.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Let’s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs / Economics / Technology
By: MISES
Peter St. Onge writes: The job-threatening rise of the machines is an economically illiterate meme that refuses to die. We’re actually probably in the early stages of it, a bull-market in neo-luddism, if you will. Bastiat’s “Candlemakers Petititon” answered this one long ago, but today I’ll run a little thought experiment that owes it all to good old Bastiat.
Let’s say Weird Al Yankovic invents a machine capable of making everything with a single push of a button. The first thing he does is print up a bunch of machines and sell them for a ton. Weird Al is now a billionaire, and there are thousands of make-everything machines.
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Thursday, June 11, 2015
The Fed's Gift of Free Money: Return to Sender / Economics / Deflation
By: EWI
The real reason consumers aren't spending is not a matter of monetary policy; it's a matter of psychology
On June 2, the postman rang once -- and, boy, did he ring.
That day, the Wall Street Journal published a strongly worded letter titled, "Grand Central: A Letter to Stingy American Consumers," which included these notable passages:
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Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Fact Checking Paul Krugman's Claim To Be "Right About Everything", Krugtron the Invincible! / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Andrew Syrios writes:
But can the debate really be as one-sided as I portray it? Well, look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible!
Thus wrote the great Paul Krugman. A man so modest as to proclaim that “I think I can say without false modesty, a huge win; I (and those of like mind) have been right about everything.”
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Tuesday, June 09, 2015
A Six-Point Plan to Restore Economic Growth and Prosperity / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
Three weeks ago I co-authored an op-ed for the Investor’s Business Daily with Stephen Moore, founder of the Club for Growth and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member, currently working with the Heritage Foundation. Our goal was to present a simple outline of the policies we need to pursue as a country in order to get us back to 3–4% annual GDP growth. As we note in the op-ed, Stephen and I have been engaging with a number of presidential candidates and with other economists around the topic of growth.
Monday, June 08, 2015
Technology Needs Capital To Produce Economic Growth / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Frank_Shostak
In his article “The Big Meh” Paul Krugman complains that despite all the information technology advances the effect so far has been negligible as far as economic growth is concerned.
Krugman writes “That the whole digital era, spanning more than four decades, is looking like a disappointment. New technologies have yielded great headlines but modest economic results. Why? ... The answer is that I don’t know — but neither does anyone else.”
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Friday, June 05, 2015
US Jobs Table 9 BLS Data Dump / Economics / Employment
By: James_Quinn
It seems the mainstream media is giddy with excitement over the 280,000 jobs supposedly created in May. The markets aren’t so happy, as good news is actually bad news. What excuse will Yellen and her fellow Wall Street puppets at the Federal Reserve use to not increase interest rates from emergency levels of 0.25%? The ten year Treasury rate immediately skyrocketed to 2.43% in seconds. It was at 1.64% in February. That’s a 46% decline in price in four months. Do you still think bonds are a safe investment? Guess what is tied to the 10 Year Treasury rate? Mortgage rates. There goes the fake housing recovery. Artificially high prices, higher mortgage rates, and young people unable to buy sounds like a perfect recipe for collapse.
Thursday, June 04, 2015
Uptown Slowdown: The Rich Are Slowing Their Spending Now, Too! / Economics / US Economy
By: Harry_Dent
Recent statistics show that the affluent are rapidly slowing in their spending. Economists are surprised, as usual. We’re not. The beauty of demographic trends is that they allow us to see changes in spending well ahead. It’s the single best indicator we have for the economy.
This is even more important in a time when many leading indicators no longer work, thanks to an economy artificially manipulated by quantitative easing. What we know from our research is that the demographic blows have already started to hit us since 2007, but that they’ll get markedly worse through 2020 and 2022.
Wednesday, June 03, 2015
Even The Good Economic Numbers Are Bad / Economics / US Economy
By: John_Rubino
US factory orders tanked again this morning, and were generally reported that way at first. To take just a few of the low-lights:
- Factory orders have declined in eight of the last nine months.
- Orders for transportation equipment fell 2.4 percent while orders for computers and consumer goods-related equipment also fell by varying amounts.
- Last month’s durable goods orders were revised to -0.3% from the original +1%.
- Business inventories remain at near-record high levels.
Monday, June 01, 2015
The Meaning of Financial Repression / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Mark_Thornton
Mark Thornton writes: We live in a world of massive monetary inflation and extremely low interest rates. Mortgage rates are near historic lows and yet it seems that people cannot get loans. Home sales are up, but with a near record percentage of sales made with cash, rather than a mortgage. The unemployment rate is nearing “full employment” and yet a record number of people do not have jobs.