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2026-01-17

• On regulatory capture
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2026-01-17 09:50:08 UTC

  Why are regulators so spineless? I ask because Ofcom’s inquiry into X’s publishing child sex abuse material is likely to take some weeks , even after cajoling by the government, and is not expected to take strong action against the company. David Allen Green has written: Ofcom may take decisive action against X, like requiring it to apologise in eight months on a webpage so buried that nobody will read it. Such scepticism is based in the evidence that regulators have consistently given companies a free ride. Ofcom has repeatedly allowed GBNews to broadcast biased news. Ofwat allows water compa [...]

2026-01-16

• To Combat Academic Fraud, Scholars Confront Hallowed Tradition
  by Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, 2026-01-16 23:25:00 UTC

  To Combat Academic Fraud, Scholars Confront Hallowed Tradition Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations , This is the fourth part of a series on the crisis in academic research and publishing. Read the first three parts here,   here and here . The driving ethos of academia, “publish or perish,” is fighting for its life.  The requirement that scholars constantly publish or face academic ruin has been considered the primary engine of scientific discovery for decades. But a growing movement of universities and researchers is trying to banish the practice to the arch [...]

2026-01-12

• What can mortgage loans do? : Purchases, re-fis, and cashouts
  by ? in FRED blog, 2026-01-12 14:00:00 UTC

  Mortgage loans allow households to buy a home or to borrow money against the value of a home they already own. With mortgage loans, the real estate is offered as collateral, a payback guarantee for the lender. Our FRED graph above shows the billions of dollars lent by large US banks to consumers in newly issued mortgage loans. Data are available between the third quarter of 2013 and the second quarter of 2025. Each of the three lines represents a separate purpose for borrowing these funds: Purchasing a home (solid blue line) Refinancing the mortgage to secure more affordable repayment terms, [...]

• The price of expertise
  by Jerusalem Demsas in The Argument, 2026-01-12 11:37:33 UTC

  Trump photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images; Powell photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images; artful composition by Jerusalem Demsas/The Argument Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell put out an astonishing statement revealing that the Trump administration was using the threat of a criminal indictment to punish him for not setting interest rates at the whim of the president. Powell’s statement is the model of resistance — if only we’d seen the same from universities, law firms, and big business throughout the last year. In response, the price of gold shot through the roof as markets finally be [...]

2025-12-30

• The Weeb Economy
  by Noah Smith in Noahpinion, 2025-12-30 09:43:45 UTC

  This March I published a book in Japanese, called Weeb Economy . Half of the book was republished (translated) posts from my blog, and half was a new section. I’ve been publishing that new section as a series of posts ( Part I , Part II , Part III ). But instead of publishing the final part as a fourth post, I figured I’d just publish the entire new section as a single post. So here you go! This is the entire new section of my book. It’s about a big idea for how to partially reverse the economic stagnation that has gripped Japan since the late 2000s. Part I: I want the Japanese future back! Ja [...]

2025-12-29

• Tracking recent financial market conditions
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-12-29 14:00:00 UTC

  The FRED Blog has discussed how the daily operations of the Federal Reserve Banks and, specifically, the New York Fed generally maintain the effective federal funds rate within the target range set by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As part of this management effort, the New York Fed monitors a variety of overnight interest rates that help take the pulse of financial markets and the overall cost of borrowing. Data added to FRED last October allow us to see how recent changes to the Federal Reserve System’s balance sheet have impacted money market conditions. The FRED graph above sho [...]

2025-12-23

• The NIMBY Christmas cinematic universe
  by Jerusalem Demsas in The Argument, 2025-12-23 11:02:45 UTC

  Chad Michael Murray presenting his evil plan at a community meeting ( An Autumn Romance trailer screenshot) If you’ve been enjoying The Argument and would like to share it with friends and family for the holidays, you’re in luck! You can save 15% now through Dec. 24 when you gift a subscription to The Argument using the link below. Gift a subscription If I only watched movies where the character turns directly to the camera and says “I’m exactly the kind of liberal you are,” I would not watch very many movies. Still, it’s hard not to doom when every holiday season I’m accosted with anti-develo [...]

2025-12-20

• Wallowing in poverty
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-12-20 10:37:52 UTC

  Imagine we were to suffer an economic catastrophe in which our real incomes fall by 30%, which would be by far the greatest recession in modern times. The response, one might imagine, would be equally dramatic; there’d be a backlash against the government - very likely causing serious political unrest - and our politics would be dominated by the question of what caused the slump and what to do about it. In fact, we don’t have to imagine such a disaster. It has actually happened. In the last 20 years real GDP per person has grown by just 0.6% a year compared to 2.3% per year in the previous 50 [...]

2025-12-17

• FDI is the Missing Piece of Japan’s Puzzle
  by Noah Smith in Noahpinion, 2025-12-17 10:04:22 UTC

  Photo by Sanjo via Wikimedia Commons My book, Weeb Economy came out in March, but only in Japanese. Half of the book was a series of translated posts from my blog, so those are already in English. The other half was a new part that I wrote in English and had translated into Japanese by my excellent translator, Kataoka Hirohito. So while I’ll eventually republish the whole book in English, what I can do right now is to publish my English-language first draft as a series of posts on this blog. The first installment was entitled “ I Want the Japanese Future Back! ”. In that post, I explained why [...]

2025-11-18

• From Statute to Zero-Cost: Section 31A and the Bombay High Court's Zero-Cost Culture
  by Anurodh in Ajay Shah's blog, 2025-11-18 08:38:56 UTC

  by Prashant Narang and Vishnu Suresh. Why this matters now In 2015, Parliament rewrote Section 31A of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act to make loser-pays the default i.e., compensate the winner and deter abuse. A decade on, our mixed-methods study of the Bombay High Court's arbitration docket(2023-24) shows a stark gap between that legislative design and courtroom reality. Out of 102 decisions under Sections 11 (appointment) and 34 (set-aside), costs were imposed in only four (3.9%). Even then, costs were framed as exceptional sanctions for egregious conduct - not as routine reimbursement [...]

2025-11-06

• On competenciness
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-11-06 12:24:17 UTC

  Geoff Mulgan has written a great piece on the shortcomings of a centrism which wants “to be thought of as practical competent problem-solvers, sensible, grown-up and realistic.” I agree that Mulgan is right to call this a dead-end. I want to argue, though, that it is a dead-end in its own terms: a genuinely realistic competence would see that a government cannot survive merely by aspiring to competence. Charlie Munger once said something very wise and important: One skill is knowing the edge of your own competency. It’s not a competency if you don’t know the edge of it. And even the best polit [...]

2025-09-29

• Trends in the US distribution of net worth
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-09-29 13:00:00 UTC

  Net worth is the difference between total assets and liabilities. Tracking changes in the distribution of net worth can provide insight into how individual economic groups are faring, at least compared with each other. Our FRED graph above uses Board of Governors financial accounts data from third quarter 1989 to first quarter 2025 to track five percentile groups of US households: Top 0.1% Top 1% 90th to 99th percentiles 50th to 90th percentiles 1st to 50th percentiles For most of the time, the 90th to 99th percentile group (pink line) has had the largest share of overall net worth. Much of [...]

2025-09-23

• Reinforcing the Anchor: The Next Five Years of Inflation Targeting in India
  by Anurodh in Ajay Shah's blog, 2025-09-23 17:24:00 UTC

  by Rajeswari Sengupta and Ajay Shah. The adoption of inflation targeting (IT) in 2015 marked a watershed in India's monetary policy. It is a delight to look back to those dramatic weeks . For the first time since its establishment in 1934, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) graduated from being a `temporary provision', to a clear legal mandate to maintain consumer price index (CPI) inflation at 4 percent. This shift to a rule-based and transparent framework, with price stability as the explicit objective, strengthened the RBI's credibility, and helped anchor household inflation expectations by r [...]

2025-09-18

• The ups and downs in credit card borrowing lines
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-09-18 13:00:00 UTC

  During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many credit card holders improved their repayment histories and enjoyed a noticeable boost in credit scores . However, research by Juan M. Sánchez and Masataka Mori at the St. Louis Fed has underscored the temporary nature of the factors driving that improvement in creditworthiness. Our FRED graph above uses large bank credit card data, reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia , to offer a complementary perspective on this topic: The solid blue line shows the percentage of credit card accounts that recorded an increase in their borrowing [...]

2025-09-11

• Trends in US labor force participation rates for men
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-09-11 13:00:00 UTC

  The labor force participation rate (LFPR)—the percentage of civilians employed or actively seeking work—has declined since the turn of the century as shown in our first FRED graph above. Previously, total LFPR had risen after an increase in women entering the workforce and a corresponding but smaller drop in men’s LFPR. Since 1990, women’s LFPR has stabilized but men’s LFPR has continued to decline at an average rate of 2.7 percentage points per decade. Our second FRED graph above splits male workers into three age groups—15 to 24 (high school and college age); 25 to 54 (prime working age); [...]

2025-09-08

• Afghanistan: Losing the Republic
  by Sarkar,N in India at LSE, 2025-09-08 00:53:05 UTC

  Afghanistan’s Republic (2001–21) did not fall only because the US left or because the Taliban captured territory and adapted faster than expected. As Basir Arian argues, it collapsed because of a variety of systemic reasons leading to a crisis of everyday legitimacy in the Republic, leading to an inevitable collapse. * Most post-mortems of the dramatic collapse of the Republic in Afghanistan in August 2021 emphasise proximate triggers: the Doha Agreement , the timetable of withdrawal and Taliban adaptation. These did matter. Yet the decisive pathway ran through corruption, which widened [...]

2025-08-25

• Overdue mortgage payments by property type : New data insights from the Philadelphia Fed
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-08-25 13:00:00 UTC

  The FRED Blog has discussed the dwindling supply of multifamily dwellings with 2 to 4 units. This trend even has its own name: the “missing middle.” Today, we tap into newly added data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia to offer additional insights into this segment of the housing market. Our FRED graph above shows the share of mortgage balances that are 60 or more days past due, broken down by property type: single family (solid blue line) condo/co-op (dotted light blue line) 2 to 4 units (dashed orange line) townhouse/planned (dashed-dotted purple line). Quarterly data are avai [...]

2025-08-23

• Work-from-Home as a Lever Against the Motherhood Penalty
  by Dani Sandler in Dismal Scientist, 2025-08-23 14:32:53 UTC

  Emma Harrington and Matthew Khan recently posted their paper "Has the Rise of Work-from-Home Reduced the Motherhood Penalty in the Labor Market?" as an NBER working paper . I first encountered this paper at the Society of Labor Economics annual meeting in May 2024 and I have been a little obsessed over the idea ever since. The motherhood penalty seems like such an intractable problem. It has been measured in countries that have lots of supports for families like extended parental leave and subsidized childcare like Denmark , Sweden , and Norway , as well as those with almost none (ie the US ). [...]

2025-08-08

• The political communications problem
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-08-08 13:22:00 UTC

  Sir Keir Starmer thinks the government has a communications problem. He's right, but not in the way he thinks. James Austin summarized succinctly what many believe Starmer's problem to be: There simply isn't a 'good' way to get a message out now; traditional platforms have diminished and have been replaced by a incredibly uncontrolled and fragmented system. That makes it very hard to get central messaging out. The PM has made two responses to this. On the one hand, he has invited "influencers" into Downing Street in the hope of reaching voters who don't consumer legacy media. But on the other [...]

2025-08-02

• Stagnation: get used to it
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-08-02 13:27:00 UTC

  The debate about how to raise UK economic growth begs a question: is rapid growth possible even with the best feasible policies? My chart shows growth in real GDP per head over 30-year periods since 1750. Trend growth of much above 1% per year is unusual, seen mostly only in the post-1945 period. From a long-run perspective, therefore, the stagnation of recent years are a reversion to the norm. Why was the post-1945 period so unusual? On one view, it was because WWII created a large backlog of civilian investment opportunities as well as a need to repair war-damaged assets, not least of them h [...]

2025-07-27

• Some leftist economic policies
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-07-27 13:35:00 UTC

  The launch of a new leftist party poses the question: what should its economic policies be? I'll tell you what they shouldn't be: fiscal expansion. The macroeconomic policy stance must be a matter of fact, not ideology. And the fact is that we are close to the point at which increased aggregate demand would add to inflation expectations. That would mean higher interest rates, which in turn would depress much-needed housebuilding and other forms of capital spending. Rachel Reeves might be wrong to talk about fiscal rules but she is dead right to want fiscal restraint. Here, every leftist is scr [...]

2025-07-24

• What is authoritarian backscratching – and why is this a threat?
  by Isabelle DeSisto in The Monkey Cage, 2025-07-24 13:48:58 UTC

  Quid pro quo policies help authoritarian regimes stay in power. Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko in Saint Petersburg, Russia, June 2022 (cc) Kremlin.ru , via Wikimedia Commons. Even the most isolated authoritarian regimes cannot survive completely on their own. North Korea may be the model pariah state, but it still relies on allies – like China and Russia – to provide basic goods like raw materials and food . Still, as every good dictator knows, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In one recent example, Russia secretly transferred over a [...]

• International comovement in economic indicators : Recent insights from the Richmond Fed
  by ? in FRED blog, 2025-07-24 13:00:00 UTC

  FRED has data from multiple sources that can help reveal correlations between macroeconomic indicators and policy variables across major economies. For example, the FRED Blog has discussed international comovements in monetary policy before. Today, we dig deeper into economic comovement by looking at recent research from the Richmond Fed. Researchers Katherine Anderson, Paul Ho, and Nathan Robino used GDP and inflation data from 27 countries between 1981 and 2023 to study how much the U.S. economy moves in parallel with other countries. They found substantial correlations among all countries: [...]

2025-07-20

• Not debating immigration
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-07-20 13:39:00 UTC

  How should we debate immigration? Here's my advice: don't. Debates don't work , at least not as they should. They don't favour the truth, but plausible liars and for those who can best appeal to prejudice and cognitive bias. Jonathan Portes, who is doing great work in trying to bring facts and rationality to the issue, describes his opponents' strategy : "Flood the zone with a mixture of lies, half-truths, misleading claims and statistics taken out of context." Against this, rational discussion is bringing a knife to a gunfight. We needn't look far for a parallel here. It's now obvious that Br [...]

2025-06-16

• IAREP Kahneman Lecture: Economic Psychology and Behavioural Public Policy
  by Liam Delaney in Economics, Psychology and Policy, 2025-06-16 22:23:00 UTC

  Those masterful images because complete / Grew in pure mind but out of what began? / A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, / Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, / Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut / Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. WB Yeats - The Circus Animals' Desertion I will be giving one of the keynote lectures at the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology in Estonia in June. The talk will outline ideas on the role of economic psyc [...]

2025-06-14

• Why we need a strong left
  by Chris Dillow in Chris Dillow, 2025-06-14 13:49:00 UTC

  Anyone hoping that the marginalization of the Labour left would lead to rational, liberal policy has been badly disappointed by Starmer's recent remarks (pdf) on immigration echoing Enoch Powell and speaking of "incalculable" damage. "Disgraceful and damaging" says Simon Wren-Lewis; "untethered from reality" says Jonathan Portes; and "a moral, political and economic embarrassment" says Ian Dunt. I want to suggest that there's a causal link here. The absence of leftist voices in mainstream political discourse is a cause of dishonesty, lies and stupidity in policy-making. I'm not going to try to [...]