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.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Labor market tightness has stabilized over the last several months after a loosening steadily through the summer. Job openings were up and quits down. My favorite metric, job openings per unemployed, was stable.
Here are openings and quits. They've been telling a somewhat contradictory story in recent months as openings are up and quits are down.
The economy remains on the Beveridge curve--admittedly the tight part of it.
Broadly speaking what has happened is core services inflation as only slowed a little (less than people were hoping on lagged shelter) while goods prices have started rising--with unusually large auto price increases in November that could still be hurricane-related.
I believe it is useful to make small contributions to big things (many engaged in doing that now) & also bigger contributions to small things.
On the later, in @BostonGlobe I argue for zoning reform to enable Cambridge to help build more than 1,000 additional housing units.
A🧵
States and localities can resist the likely regressive thrust of federal policymaking while doing what they can to build a more progressive, inclusive and upwardly mobile society.
To do that we need cheaper housing.
And to do that we need more housing.
VP Harris was right to set a goal of building 3 million housing units. On a proportional basis that would require 1,050 from Cambridge. Unfortunately on current course we'll get 100. But with reforms proposed by the City Council that could be raised to more than 1,000.
I know many skeptics of prediction markets. I don't have an ideological faith in them (OK, maybe quasi ideological). But the empirical evidence is they have worked really, really, really well. And did again on Tuesday night.
A short 🧵 about this remarkable picture.
Markets gave Trump a 60% chance. How does that prove they know what they're doing? If Harris won could say, "but she had a 40% chance" so wasn't wrong.
That's correct. Can only judge when you've seen them many, many times. Do 60% chance things happen 60% of the time?
In Ec10 we should them 15 million data points from sports betting from @andrewlilley_au comparing the prediction market probability to the outcomes.
And guess what: if you collect 100 markets with a 6% chance of a team winning and look at the results you'll see them win 6 times.
The macroeconomy is strong--high growth, low unemployment, falling inflation--the best of any advanced economy.
But there was a reluctance to present/understand how families were still not out of the deep inflation hole. And too much masked by cherrypicking/misleading stats.
IF Donald Trump had been President for the last 4 yrs here are some stats you would have heard more from progressives. Relative to 2019:
--Real median household income down 0.7%
--3m more people in poverty (poverty rate up 0.6pp)
--Unemp rate up 0.6pp
--Mortgage rate up 3pp
To be clear: Not claiming these were or weren't Biden-Harris's fault (e.g., if Congress had passed their child tax credit maybe poverty down). Also not saying that they are the only objective perspective on economy (I omit positive data). But under appreciated by progressives.