Stagflation Lite: 1st Quarter US GDP Growth Weakens to 1.1 Percent Amid a Renewed Inflationary Surge
Real US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew at an annualized rate of 1.1 percent in the first quarter of 2023, coming in within the lower half of estimates that ranged from 0.4 to 3.5 percent on Bloomberg. This is a decline from the 2.6 percent that the US economy grew in the 4th quarter of […]
Why commodity-trading scandals are multiplying
The choppy waters of commodity trading have claimed another victim. On April 23rd it emerged that ING, a Dutch lender, was suing ICBC, China’s biggest bank. ING accuses ICBC of releasing export documents to Maike, a trader that once handled a quarter of China’s copper imports, without first collecting payment owed to ING. Shortly after […]
Patriotic Ukrainians are rushing to pay their taxes
Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war After Russia invaded in February last year, Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, braced, logically enough, for government revenues to “plummet”. He says he expected them to fall by roughly as much as economic activity. That did not happen. Although Ukraine’s gdp plunged by 29% in […]
If China’s growth is so strong, why is inflation so weak?
When America unshackled its economy from pandemic-era restrictions two years ago, it also unlocked inflation. By mid-2021, consumer prices were rising by more than 5% compared with the previous year. China’s later, faster reopening is now more than three months old. But inflation remains locked down. Consumer prices rose by only 0.7% year-on-year in March, […]
REMINDER: Inflation was at 1.4% When Biden Took Office
Inflation was only 1.4% when Biden took office. He began implementing policies on his first day that directly created the energy crisis in the US. He refused to reopen the economy under the pretense of COVID for as long as possible, disrupting the supply chain and damaging small businesses. Biden has created multi-trillion dollar spending […]
Musing on Condorcet’s Paradox – Econlib
Paradoxes make good brain candy, in my opinion. As a rough approximation, statements can be deemed a paradox when they provoke the reaction “That can’t be right but I also don’t see how it can be wrong.” W. V. Quine once described how paradoxes can be put into three different categories: veridical, falsidical, and antinomy. […]
