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%. Core Retail Sales (ex Autos) was up 0.7% in March following an unrevised 0.3% in February. Today's headline and core numbers came above the Investing.com forecasts, which were 0.8% for Headline and 0.5% for Core. The first chart below is a log-scale snapshot of retail sales since the early 1990s. Here is the Core version, which excludes autos. Here is a year-over-year snapshot of overall series. Here is the year-over-year performance of at Core Retail Sales. Here is an overlay of Headline and Core Sales since 2000. After the March Consumer Price Index is released tomorrow, we'll take a more detailed look at retail sales adjusted both for inflation and population growth.
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. It's just out in paperback, published by Princeton University Press.
In their landmark study of hundreds of financial crises in 66 countries over 800 years, Reinhart and Rogoff find oft-repeated patterns that ought to alert economists when trouble is on the way. One thing stops them waking up in time: their perpetual belief that ''this time is different''. Advertisement Reinhart and Rogoff could have told them - did tell them - financial crises of this nature aren't so easily escaped. Refinanced. 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). In all cases, we tried to match the size and quality of the items as closely as possible in both years. Bottom Line: In 1950, it would have taken almost 8 months of full-time work at the average manufacturing wage to earn the $1,650 needed to purchase the 16 items above at the retail prices in 1950 (or 31.7 weeks, 158.4 days, or 1,267 hours). To what do we owe this significant 80% reduction in the time cost of household goods over time? 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. Despite the world’s unprecedented total wealth, there is vast insecurity, unrest, and dissatisfaction.
In the United States, a large majority of Americans believe that the country is “on the wrong track.” Pessimism has soared. The same is true in many other places. Against this backdrop, the time has come to reconsider the basic sources of happiness in our economic life. In this respect, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has been leading the way. Dozens of experts recently gathered in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, to take stock of the country’s record. All who gathered in Thimphu agreed on the importance of pursuing happiness rather than pursuing national income. Here are some of the initial conclusions. Second, relentless pursuit of GNP to the exclusion of other goals is also no path to happiness. Fourth, global capitalism presents many direct threats to happiness. A Land Where the BlackBerry Still Thrives. Asian Success Mythology.
The blog yesterday provoked a lot of healthy debate about my claim that industrialization is mainly market-driven rather than state-driven, using Korea, China, and India as examples of industrialization out of poverty. I know I am going against the conventional wisdom of the great Asian “developmental state,” authoritarian and heavily involved in planning industrialization. So let me explain why. When I said we can only test what works on average, I am talking about what propositions are testable and falsifiable, using Karl Popper’s definition of what is “real” science.
There is no way to test policies if you allow what works to be different in every year and every country, since a hypothesis about ANY policy will always fit the data perfectly under this assumption. We could also test industrial policy using within-country data. Now, let’s go back to country data and look at the suggestion that we focus only on the success stories in East Asia. 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%. This represents a significant deceleration from the 11% rate averaged over the five years through 2010.
Should we take this 7% target seriously? Of course, it is difficult to be too critical of past Chinese policies. So are China’s leaders again underestimating their economy’s growth capacity? There is reason to think not – that this time Chinese officials are convinced that a slowdown is coming. Print - What Makes a Nation Rich? One Economist's Big Answer. We are the rich, the haves, the developed. And most of the rest — in Africa, South Asia, and South America, the Somalias and Bolivias and Bangladeshes of the world — are the nots. It's always been this way, a globe divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine, though the extent of inequality across nations today is unprecedented: The average citizen of the United States is ten times as prosperous as the average Guatemalan, more than twenty times as prosperous as the average North Korean, and more than forty times as prosperous as those living in Mali, Ethiopia, Congo, or Sierra Leone.
The question social scientists have unsuccessfully wrestled with for centuries is, Why? But the question they should have been asking is, How? Because inequality is not predetermined. Nations are not like children — they are not born rich or poor. Their governments make them that way. It's the same with the theories put forth today. And yet they are far from the same. The U. “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. Bad managers are also presumably a global problem: “The Office” has been exported to over 50 countries. Economists have long puzzled over why there are such astounding differences in productivity across both firms and countries (Syverson 2011). One reason for this scepticism is the complexity of management, making it hard to measure and quantify. Our experiment in India involved 20 large textile firms.
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.
One view says that the interest rate is determined by the supply of and demand for savings – the “loanable funds” approach. How can both views be true? And that’s IS-LM: 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. What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?
SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. 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 Submissions There have been more than 100 submissions made to this inquiry.
Treasury submission (submission no 111) The Treasury submission discusses the role of competition policy, the purpose and operation of s 46, including the outcomes of recent reviews, and price discrimination (including the outcome of previous reviews). On the issue of misuse of market power [p 11] Market power is a distinct economic concept to market share. Section 49 was subsequently repealed in 1995 through the Competition Policy Reform Act 1995. Transcripts.