Pulse: US


Food inflation threatens lives and economic recovery - Financial Times

Shortages are a window on to the challenges facing the post-pandemic world economy. This article originally appeared in the Financial Times.

It’s a sign of the times. In China, teachers are gobbling up the leftovers from their students’ lunch plates, on the spot. Their diligent economising follows an exhortation by President Xi Jinping that the nation needs to reduce food waste, in part to increase Chinese food self-sufficiency.

No Quiet Monument: EconVue Spotlight

Last weekend I drove through the Skokie Lagoons, just north of Chicago. They are both beautiful and manmade, created literally from the sweat of the Great Depression. Four million cubic tons of soil were removed to form a series of lagoons from the existing marshlands. It was one of the largest public works projects of FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, employing thousands of men, including three African-American construction companies. Started in 1933, the project took until the beginning of the US entry into World War II in 1941 to complete.

My Remarks at EconVue Webinar on Sustainability

Asset owners are at the apex of the global investment community and many are focused on and in the vanguard of sustainability investing movement. They are an important part of a reallocation of capital to long-term investments in those companies with a credible vision for mitigating risks associated with the really big megatrends and their potential for undercutting long-term competitiveness and value creation.

Trump’s Bungled Pandemic Response Has Badly Damaged Americans’ Incomes

Donald Trump may have normalized cognitive dissonance for many of his supporters and some young people.  But wishing away the pandemic does not affect reality.  

Are We There Yet? EconVue Spotlight - June 2020

Yesterday Peter Navarro declared that the US-China trade deal was dead in the water, which his boss quickly walked back on Twitter. In a world of global threats, should bilateral disputes remain our focus, or are we wasting precious time? As I wrote for the G7 Research Group:

Moral Mentors: Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility in Era of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter

Well before Nike or Starbucks was even a glimmer in the eye of their founders, a little-known economist sat down at his desk in the 1950s in America to write why he believed companies are obliged to be responsible citizens.

USA's annual money growth exceeds 25%, the highest in its modern peacetime history

Last Friday the Federal Reserve published another week of data on the US commercial banks’ assets and liabilities, completing the month of May. Deposits rose by 0.2% in the week to 27th May, so that the sequence of weeks since the start of March is as given in the table below.

No, the Unemployment Rate Didn’t Really Drop in May

This article was originally published by Washington Monthly.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) surprised the markets and most economists Friday with an announcement that the unemployment rate fell from 14.7 percent in April to 13.3 percent in May. President Donald Trump had the temerity to boast that George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, was “looking down from heaven” to admire those numbers. “This is a great day for him,” Trump said in the Rose Garden. “This is a great day for everybody.”

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