If you think corporate greed is playing a major role in the current inflation then you need to rethink a lot of your views.
1. FISCAL MULTIPLIERS. Fiscal stimulus is less effective than you thought because it will go more into prices/profits than quantities.
2. INCIDENCE ANALYSIS OF FISCAL TRANSFERS. Distributional tables that show the stimulus checks going to households, for example, not correctly reflect that much of the benefit of the stimulus checks was captured by higher prices instead of higher purchasing power.
3. WORKER POWER AND REAL WAGES. If stronger demand raised the ability of corporations to do unfair or unjustified price increases over and above their costs then the flip side is you are saying that heating the economy lowers real wages.
(All of the above assumed that corporate greed was increased by high demand relative to supply, if it was just an exogenous increase in corporate greed—companies that could have done this in 2019 but mistakenly didn’t—the points would be slightly different.)
Oh, and I’m not updating my views on these topics because I think inflation is the result of demand and supply imbalances not changes in corporate greed.
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On the surface a strong jobs report (130K jobs & unemployment falls to 4.3%).
And just about every detail makes it even stronger: participation up, involuntary part-time down, hours up, wages up.
The mystery of strong GDP and weak jobs is being resolved in the direction of GDP.
The job growth happened despite further cuts in federal jobs. Private employment was up an impressive 172K.
Note, breakeven job growth is currently about 25-50K because of reduced net immigration & also more fully recovered participation. So job growth has slowed but the unemployment rate now seems to have stabilized after slowly and steadily increasing since mid-2023.
I will be enthusiastically supporting faculty legislation to cap the number of A's at Harvard at 20% (plus a bit). The collective action problem that has driven grades higher & higher over time is increasingly problematic. I hope other institutions consider similar steps.
I've talked to numerous colleagues & students about grade inflation. Almost all of them see it as a a problem. I've also heard about as many different ideas for solutions as I've had conversations. I would tweak this proposal in various ways. But would support it over nothing.
One place the current system fails--and it's not the only place--is honors. I'm on the Committee to recommend honors in the economics department. It's increasingly hard to distinguish excellence with so many A's. I believe that now even two A-'s makes you ineligible for Summa.
Depending on how you look at it growth in Q3 was very very strong or very strong or just possibly merely strong. Annual rates:
GDP: 4.3%
Real final sales to domestic purchasers: 2.9%
Average of GDP & GDI: 3.4%
GDI: 2.4%
A big part of the story was consumer spending up at a 3.5% annual rate. Started the year looking weak but new data and revisions have made consumers very strong.
Business fixed investment a bit weaker but also very heterogenous. Equipment investment and IPP up but non-residential structures down for the seventh straight quarter.