Retail Sales in Review. March Advance Retail Sales Beat Expectations By Doug Short April 14, 2014 The Advance Retail Sales Report released this morning shows that sales in March rose 1.1% month-over-month, up from 0.7% in February, which was upwardly revised from 0.3%.
The causes: A very short history of the crisis. America and the euro crisis: Debt, guilt and America's good fortune. Measuring poverty: Welfare works. Economic history ignored leads to the inevitable. When the Queen asked economists why so few of them had foreseen the global financial crisis, our professor Geoff Harcourt and some other academics petitioned her to say, among other things, that one reason was their profession's loss of interest in economic history.
That sad truth was demonstrated convincingly by two American professors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, in a book which has since become a modern classic, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. The Miracle of the Market. With some help from the Student Entrepreneur Society at the University of Michigan-Flint (especially Jennifer Moore), and an old 1950 Sears catalog purchased from Ebay, we were able to compare the costs of 16 typical household items in 1950 to the costs of those same items today, measured in the cost of our time to purchase those household items.
Using the average hourly manufacturing wage of $1.30 in 1950 and $18.01 today, the hours of work to purchase those 16 household items in both 1950 and 2009 are displayed above (click to enlarge). The Economics of Happiness - Jeffrey D. Sachs. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space NEW YORK – We live in a time of high anxiety. A Land Where the BlackBerry Still Thrives. Asian Success Mythology. Slowing China - Barry Eichengreen. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space BERKELEY – With the world’s rich countries still hung over from the financial crisis, the global economy has come to depend on emerging markets to drive growth. Increasingly, machinery exporters, energy suppliers, and raw-materials producers alike look to China and other fast-growing developing countries as the key source of incremental demand. But Chinese officials warn that their economy is poised to slow. In late February, Premier Wen Jiabao announced that the target for annual GDP growth over the next five years is 7%. Print - What Makes a Nation Rich? One Economist's Big Answer. We are the rich, the haves, the developed. “The Office” goes to India: How bad management keeps India poor. “The Office”, a popular British television programme, has been shown in more than 50 countries. Its international appeal likely stems from its universal theme: managerial incompetence.
This column looks at the case of India and shows how the poor management of its companies is holding the country back. Anyone who has seen the TV show “The Office” knows about the impact of bad management on office productivity. David Brent (Michael Scott in the US version) is the notoriously incompetent manager who can do nothing right. Everything he touches goes wrong.
IS-LMentary. A number of readers, both at this blog and other places, have been asking for an explanation of what IS-LM is all about.
Fair enough – this blogosphere conversation has been an exchange among insiders, and probably a bit baffling to normal human beings (which is why I have been labeling my posts “wonkish”). [Update: IS-LM stands for investment-savings, liquidity-money -- which will make a lot of sense if you keep reading] So, the first thing you need to know is that there are multiple correct ways of explaining IS-LM. That’s because it’s a model of several interacting markets, and you can enter from multiple directions, any one of which is a valid starting point.
My favorite of these approaches is to think of IS-LM as a way to reconcile two seemingly incompatible views about what determines interest rates. Economics Presentations. Bad Education. The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans.
Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting. Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. Migration. Milkonomics. Inquiry home page Referred to Senate Economics Committee on 10 February.
Submissions due: 28 February 2011 Reporting date: 15 April 2011 (extended to 20 April 2011). Note, a brief interim report was released on 20 April and a second interim report was released on 9 May. A final report was promised by 1 October but has been delayed - on 22 September the Senate granted an extension of time for reporting until 1 November 2011. Submissions | Transcripts.