- "It's cynical. It's a destruction of the meaning of words, it's Orwellian at its worst," says @FrankLuntz on the @POTUS response to the CPI data. "More than 70% of Americans have trouble making ends meet because of inflation."
- “The GOP's main campaign plank is getting sawed off” I suppose that it will take 3 quarters of negative GDP growth for you to call it a recession. Because, right now, things are looking rather “funky”.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter that I foolishly considered somewhat anodyne, not likely to get much reaction. It seemed probable that the initial estimate for G.D.P. growth in the second quarter would be negative and that many people would declare that this meant the United States was in a recession. So I spent some time pedantically explaining why we don’t actually use “two negative quarters” to define recessions and why, given other data, America probably wasn’t in one.
Silly me. I immediately received the biggest wave of hate mail I’ve gotten since the Iraq War, although it tapered off as many other economists and institutions declared that we weren’t in recession — not yet, anyway — and it pretty much vanished after Friday’s monster jobs report.
But absence of a recession aside, one question I get asked is what happened to the “Biden boom” I — and many other economists — predicted?
- That sure sounds like a whole lotta measurement error to me. I'm not sure anyone actually believes we became less productive last quarter. [Note: This is not a dig at the BLS... data are noisy; measurement is difficult, etc]
They really did it. The Inflation Reduction Act, which is mainly a climate change bill with a side helping of health reform, passed the Senate on Sunday; by all accounts it will easily pass the House, so it’s about to become law.
This is a very big deal. The act isn’t, by itself, enough to avert climate disaster. But it’s a huge step in the right direction, and sets the stage for more action in the years ahead. It will catalyze progress in green technology; its economic benefits will make passing additional legislation easier; it gives the United States the credibility it needs to lead a global effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
There are, of course, cynics eager to denigrate the achievement. Some on the left rushed to dismiss the bill as a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry posing as environmental action. More important, Republicans — who unanimously opposed the legislation — are shouting the usual things they shout: Big spending! Inflation!
- A lot of focus on how much smaller in dollar terms than the original BBB proposal — although you want to bear in mind that the bipartisan infrastructure bill added about $550 billion spending over baseline. But also important to understand what *wasn't* lost from BBB 2/
- Everyone's clamoring for #gasprices they paid at the height of the pandemic. You want your $1.86 or whatever price? Go back in time to when the economy was in the can, millions were let go from their jobs, the stock market crashed, and when there wasn't an answer yet to Covid.
S&P500 | |||
---|---|---|---|
VIX | |||
Eurostoxx50 | |||
FTSE100 | |||
Nikkei 225 | |||
TNX (UST10y) | |||
EURUSD | |||
GBPUSD | |||
USDJPY | |||
BTCUSD | |||
Gold spot | |||
Brent | |||
Copper |
- Top 50 publishers (last 24 hours)