At a time when most of the region’s governments are beholden to Washington, the remarkable political transformation underway just south of the US border provides a beacon of hope for the peoples of Latin America and their quest for true independence. 

September 2018, Dean Baker

Dean Baker
Truthout, September 10, 2018

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, September 9, 2018

NYT readers were no doubt disturbed to see a column in which former Fed Reserve Board chair Ben Bernanke, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson patted themselves on the back for their performance in the financial crisis. First, as they acknowledge in the piece, all three completely failed to see the crisis coming.

During the years when house prices were getting way out of line with both their long-term trend and rents, Bernanke was a Fed governor, then head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and then Fed chair. He openly dismissed the idea that the run-up in house prices could pose any threat to the economy. Henry Paulson was at Goldman Sachs until he became Treasury Secretary in the middle of 2006. As the bank's CEO, he was personally profiting from the bubble as the bank played a central role in securitizing mortgage-backed securities. Timothy Geithner was president of the New York Fed, where he was paid over $400,000 a year to make sure that the Wall Street banks were not taking on excessive risk.

It is bad enough that these three didn't see the crisis coming, but they still seem utterly clueless. They tell readers:

"Productivity growth was slowing, wages were stagnating, and the share of Americans who were working was shrinking. That put pressure on family incomes even as inequality rose and upward social mobility declined. The desire to maintain relative living standards no doubt contributed to a surge in household borrowing before the crisis."

Actually, productivity growth didn't begin to slow until 2006, as the bubble was hitting its peak. Growth was quite strong from 2000 to 2005, which means the cause of wage stagnation in those years must lie elsewhere. (If they had access to government trade data they might think the explosion of the trade deficit to 6.0 percent of GDP played a role.) The surge in borrowing clearly preceded the productivity slowdown as could be seen from the plunge in savings rates or reading the papers celebrating people pulling equity out of their homes by some guy named Alan Greenspan.

CEPR compiles recent research to illustrate the state of labor in the United States.

UC Berkeley Labor Center

Driverless? Autonomous Trucks and the Future of the American Trucker

With the rising prevalence of autonomous driving vehicles, Steve Vescelli breaks down how this new technology could affect the trucking industry, and poses policy considerations.

 

Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

The New Wave of Local Minimum Wage Policies: Evidence from Six Cities

Sylvia Allegretto, Anna Godoey, Carl Nadler and Michael Reich examine how increases in minimum wages have affected employment outcomes in Chicago, DC, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and Seattle.

Eileen AppelbaumThe Hill, September 7, 2018

September 7, 2018

September 7, 2018 (Jobs Byte)

After increasing for 12 consecutive months, manufacturing employment fell by 3,000 in August. The decline was all in manufacturing of durables, which lost 4,000 jobs. Employment in non-durable manufacturing rose by 1,000. The auto industry was the biggest loser, giving up 4,900 jobs after losing 3,500 jobs in July. The weakness also shows up in the index of hours, which dropped 0.3 percent for durable manufacturing in August.

September 7, 2018, Lara Merling

Justin Talbot-Zorn
The Nation, September 6, 2018

(This post originally appeared on my Patreon page.)

The Fact Check gang has been having a field day going after Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other proponents of Medicare for All. The latest battle is over a study produced by the right-wing Mercatus which showed that a government-run health care program could reduce national health expenditures by $2 trillion over the course of a decade (roughly 0.8 percent of GDP).

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez seized on this projection of savings coming out of a right-wing think tank as support for the greater efficiency of a universal Medicare program. Of course, this was not the point that the Mercatus folks intended people to get from their study. They highlighted the fact that their projections showed Medicare for All increasing costs to the federal government by $32.6 trillion over the first ten years of operation, with the amount equal to 10.7 percent of GDP in 2022 and rising to 12.7 percent of GDP in 2031.

The fact check crew definitely went overboard in attacking Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for misrepresenting the study. One scenario in the study did, in fact, show that Medicare for All would reduce national health care expenditures by $2 trillion over the decade.