From the Wall Street Journal Editorials, About That Obama Boom: A closing word to Trumpians who will point to the fourth-quarter decline in net exports that subtracted 1.7% from GDP. Part of the explanation is that a bumper crop of soybean
Read More
From the Wall Street Journal Editorials, About That Obama Boom: Speaking of weak, growth for all of 2016 clocked in at 1.6%, the slowest since 2011 and down from 2.6% in 2015. That marks the 11th consecutive year that GDP
Read More
from The Clinton Plan’s Growth Deficit by John Cochrane in The Wall Street Journal The rest of Mrs. Clinton’s economic agenda is a thousand-course smorgasbord of government expansions, with the same deficiencies. A random sample: Higher taxes on capital gains and corporations.
Read More
From Barron’s Stephanie Pomboy: A Grim Outlook for the Economy, Stocks by Leslie Norton The statistics bear this out. Over the last four years, U.S. nominal GDP growth has gone from 4.3% to 4.1% to 3% to 2.4%. The deflator, the inflation
Read More
from The Clinton Plan’s Growth Deficit by John Cochrane in The Wall Street Journal America’s foremost economic problem is sclerotic growth. If the economy continues to expand at only 1% to 2% a year, instead of the historical 3% to
Read More
from The Clinton Plan’s Growth Deficit by John Cochrane in The Wall Street Journal Her speech Thursday at least identifies the problem: “Powerful special interests and the tendency to put ideology ahead of political progress have led to gridlock in Congress.” To
Read More
The internet gave rise to Google and Facebook. The iPhone gave rise to Uber. The ideologies are important only to the extent that they facilitated ideas. Our current development is less dependent on assets and physical capital than ideas. We
Read More
Firms Shy Away from Spending– Eric Morath in the WSJ Companies appear reluctant to step up spending on the basic building blocks of the economy, such as machines, computers and new buildings. The broadest measure of U.S. business investment advanced
Read More
Economist John Cochrane wrote a 10,000 word essay, Economic Growth. Scott Grannis blogged some excerpts here: a few of them: When we say broaden the base by removing deductions and credits, we should be serious about that. Thus, even the holy trinity of
Read More
Economist John Cochrane wrote a 10,000 word essay, Economic Growth. Scott Grannis blogged some excerpts here: a few of them: The popular debate is about “more” vs. “less” regulation. Regulation is not more or less, regulation is effective or ineffective, smarter or dumber,
Read More
Economist John Cochrane wrote a 10,000 word essay, Economic Growth. Scott Grannis blogged some excerpts here: a few of them: Our economy is like a garden, but the garden is choked with weeds. Rather than look for some great new
Read More
Martin Feldstein writes The U.S. Underestimates Growth in The Wall Street Journal: Government statisticians are supposed to measure price inflation and real growth. Which means that, with millions of new and rapidly changing products and services, they are supposed to
Read More
Economist Scott Grannis writes in his blog Calafia Beach Pundit – Retail Sales and Supply side economics. 10/14/11 Excerpt The reason Obama’s “stimulus” plans haven’t worked is that in grand (and mistaken) Keynesian tradition, they have focused on stimulating demand,
Read More
Recent Comments