First Principles, by John Taylor
I just finished John Taylor’s new book, First Principles. It’s a very good and fast read. It’s a little over 200 pages, and not a derivative in it. I don’t think there is even an […]
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I just finished John Taylor’s new book, First Principles. It’s a very good and fast read. It’s a little over 200 pages, and not a derivative in it. I don’t think there is even an […]
Read moreDan already summarized the meat of last Friday’s jobs report, but I wanted to briefly comment on one fairly esoteric point. The Friday release included an annual “benchmark revision” to the population, labor force and […]
Read moreToday’s BLS jobs-report indicates the economy added 243 thousand jobs in January, which was about 90 thousand jobs above the consensus forecast of 155 thousand. Our forecast was 150,000. This gain was accompanied by a […]
Read moreThe US savings rate is really low and has been for some time. For many years this was explained by the argument that people were getting wealthy through appreciation of their homes and stock portfolios, […]
Read moreLouisiana Congressman Charles Boustany has introduced a bill banning withdrawals of welfare funds from ATMs at liquor stores, casinos, and strip clubs. Politicians do this sort of thing every now and then. It wasn’t that […]
Read moreThis morning’s much anticipated fourth quarter GDP release provides a preliminary estimate of real GDP growth of 2.8 percent. To be fair, perhaps the anticipation is experienced mostly by forecasting economists and financial market watchers. […]
Read moreLast September, I proposed (“The Warren Buffett Tax”) that the most effective way to extract a lot of tax revenues from Warren Buffett would be to impose a wealth tax. My tongue-in-cheek proposal was this: […]
Read moreIn his book Econoclasts1, historian Brian Domitrovic produces what he believes is the first historically rigorous account of the development of supply-side economics (that is, one that relies on primary sources). He reviews contributions to […]
Read moreIn a terrific book published last year, Antti Ilmanen1 has investigated the drivers of investment returns from a number of angles including asset class (that is, equities, fixed income, commodities), investment strategy (value, growth, momentum, […]
Read moreIn a previous article (December 10, Goodhart’s Law and Monetary Policy) we discussed Goodhart’s Law which says that once an observed empirical relationship begins to be relied upon, it will no longer work. In that […]
Read moreCalifornia has now had three consecutive months of job gains, and the State’s unemployment rate has been declining, albeit slowly. That’s an improvement, but it’s not time to break out the bubbly. For one thing, […]
Read moreForecasting is always difficult. It is even more difficult when the data keep changing. This year, we’ve been plagued by very large adjustments to GDP data. Most have been downward adjustments, but a few have […]
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