In the immediate time frame there will be inflation, but I suspect we are in for some opportunistic disinflation over the next few years (Anyone remember 1990 to 1993?) and this time we may get more than we bargained for. (The inflation rate before the Gulf War was considerably higher than 2025.)
Right now my money would be on last November for the business cycle peak, but it’s going to be a hard cycle for NBER to call, and it’s still possible the peak hasn’t happened yet. (With this employment report and the Iran war, there’s little or no chance that we avoid a recession completely.)
Getting a lot of déjà vu with this “oil shock just when the economy is already on the brink of recession” thing.
I'm a radical centrist, because only centrism can reckon with the fundamental awfulness of the world. The left and right are like "The world is awful, but we can fix it!" Only centrists can say, "The world is awful. That's the way it is. Let's see how we can try to make it a little less less awful."
Despite this morning’s report, I’m increasingly starting to go back to the view that the US should be more worried about deflation than inflation. Obviously inflation statistics in the immediate future will be above target, but this no-hire labor market is a big deal. One negative shock & who knows?
Everyone should be learning about AI—if not to use it yourself, at least to get a better idea of what mistakes your adversaries might be making by using it too naively.
One thing Trump and Xi seem to have in common is that they both want their own country to increase both its capital account balance and its current account balance at the same time, which is impossible.
Is the response of birth rates to economic growth U-shaped? Is the short-run effect the opposite of the long-run effect? Is there just a long-term trend of falling birth rates that economists attribute to whatever they happen to see? (2/2)
Rapid economic growth (poor countries getting less poor, rich countries getting richer) is associated with falling birth rates. Adverse shocks to growth (Great Depression, Great Recession, Lost Decade) are also associated with falling birth rates. Can someone explain what's gong on here? (1/2)
So Warsh is a hawk who wants to cut interest rates during a period of inflation? He wants regime change. What is the regime he wants, targeting Republican control of Congress instead of the inflation rate? (Probably miss the target this time anyhow, but I guess they can try.)
Silver setting wild records, with no help from the Hunt brothers this time around.
Any chance of a Labor-Tory coalition in the next cycle?
Chart showing number of #1 songs with key changes, showing that it went to zero and rose above zero at roughly the same times as interest rates.
I feel like key changes in popular music must have some kind of relationship to economic activity.
Unemployment claims remain low presumably because the people who need jobs are disproportionately those who have never been employed in a job that would qualify for unemployment insurance.
This one seems to have been popular on Threads
But what has distinguished the West from the rest of the world (and maybe still does, now that the Muslim world has backslid much more than the West on average) is that it rose above tradition. As a jingoistic Westerner myself, I feel like much of the West is being overtaken by internal barbarians.
While we were yet Trotskyites, Orwell died for us.
Lying to the senators or lying to the public? Or both?
August/September payrolls data are always suspect because they depends on various aspects of how the academic year is playing out.
Gonna ask this again this morning. I don’t know anything about the substantive details in places like Texas, but gerrymanders are notoriously fragile in that they involve diluting the votes from your strongest districts.
What are the chances that the Republican gerrymanders could backfire, given a (potentially large) shift in generic preference away from the Republicans?
Do coalitions of the moderate left and the far right (that exclude the center-right) happen outside the US? Because that's basically what the Democratic Party was during most of the 20th century.
In my head I still hear John Lennon singing “Here…comes..the Shit…King”
There may be other mechanisms.
Opioid addiction is also a potential side effect of blood thinners, via a similar mechanism.
Liver damage is a potential side effect of blood thinners. The mechanism is that people have to avoid NSAIDs, so they end up taking too much acetaminophen. Doctors should consider this potential adverse effect when prescribing blood thinners.
For me the subjective probability that Tylenol increases the risk of ASD is slightly higher than the probability that JD actually fucked a couch; but the harm done by acting in accordance with the latter belief is minimal. Always be integrating your loss function over your posterior #ABIYLFOYP
We could end up with too few people to do the work (e.g., to care for old people) or too many people to do the work (e.g., AI takes all the jobs). I don’t expect either, but I’m more concerned about the adjustments needed for a stagnant population than those needed for advancing technology.
AFAICT, Starbucks was a bank pretending to be a coffee company, but closing a lot of stores destroys the value of its banking services, so it's just going to be a failed coffee company now.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to make a counter offer, “To keep the government open, we’ll give you some of what you want, but not the part where you fund healthcare for illegal aliens and change everyone’s gender“?
