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Dec 14, 2022

Mainstream economists have downplayed the role corporate power played in driving inflation. But the evidence is clear: corporations exploited crises as an opportunity to extract excess profits from consumers. A 🧵on my NEW blog series with

groundworkcollaborative.org

Inflation & Corporate Power Explained: Supply Disruptions & Corporate Power - Groundwork Collabor...

By Chris Becker, Ph.D | Senior Economist and Associate Director of Policy and Research You can learn more about the author here. This blog post is the first in a ...

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Dr. Peter Q. Blair @pqblair@sfba.social

@pqblair

Feb 4

3/N Day 3 #BlackHistoryMonth Featured Scholar: Jhacova Williams

@jhacova

is an Assistant Professor

@AmericanU

. Jhacova is an innovative scholar whose work centers southern culture and the impact of our past on the economic and political outcomes today.

Ira Regmi

@Regmi_Ira

Feb 4

Why do we have to bust our butts trying to prove that some % nominal wage growth is sustainable with price stability when this is going on! It is extremely sad that we have to waste energy arguing on the terms of cis white dudes who don’t share our goals !

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Kansas City Fed

@KansasCityFed

Feb 4

How much have record corporate profits contributed to recent #inflation? Our researchers have presented evidence that markups could account for more than half of 2021 inflation. bit.ly/3kcPngb #Economy #EconTwitter

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7/11 Truther

@DaveMcNamee3000

Feb 2

He looks like Hypebeast Nosferatu

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Lindsay Owens, PhD

@owenslindsay1

Wind must be blowing our way today! Summers backtracking (or softening the ground for his about face) on ARP being inflationary! Maybe next he’ll concede it was possible to bring prices down without 10% unemployment all along!

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Jeff Stein

@JStein_WaPo

Larry Summers: Biden's rescue plan "will look much better than I thought 6 months ago" if inflation comes down but the labor market stays hot

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Louis-Philippe Rochon

@Lprochon

Next Monday, for the

@MonetaryBlog

"Monetary austerity and the war on workers " By

and

I just don't think it is all that mysterious if you follow the evidence over the conventional theory. The models macroeconomists were working with simply did not apply

My best guess: For 1 + 2: the control the Fed has over the economy is overrated and a strong labor market was maintained by aggressive fiscal stimulus And 3: Inflation was never demand-driven! Supply pressures and profits declined; so did inflaiton

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Gabriel Chodorow-Reich

@gchodorowreich

Trying to make sense of three basic facts about our macroeconomy: (1) Fed has tightened substantially over past 15 months. (2) There are essentially no visible effects in the labor market. (3) Price inflation has fallen.

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Replying to

The unemployment rate for women - It is important to sustain these gains to bridge large race and gender gaps in the unemployment rate.

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Clara Wilson (she/her)

@ClaraEWilson

The Black unemployment rate is unacceptably high at 5.4%, nearly double the white unemployment rate. Reaching full employment means no workers – regardless of race, gender, or disability – are left behind. We cannot have a healthy economy without full employment.

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Q2: Despite strong job growth, the state and local public sector has not fully recovered, and women and workers of color continue to face real disparities in the labor market. Why is it important to address these disparities in our economy?

They are operating on an incorrect theory that inflation is driven by excess demand. And they seem unwilling to let the truth (in the data) get in the way of a good story. But we know who will lose out. It will be workers and families not members of the Fed board

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Q3: Inflation has been falling for 6 consecutive months, yet the Fed remains dead set on increasing the unemployment rate and slowing down wage growth with more rate hikes. Who do these hurt the most, and what impact do they have on the economy? #JobsDay #BeyondTheNumbers

We think of the Fed as aiming for "full employment" or at worst "mild" recessions. But for whom do they mean? A mild recession is always more severe for marginalized populations. "Full" employment by the Fed's standard still imposes high unemployment for vulnerable populations.

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Clara Wilson (she/her)

@ClaraEWilson

The U.S. economy started the year strong — adding 517,000 jobs in January!!!!!! All the evidence points to the fact that we don't need to choose between a strong labor market and lower inflation.

@federalreserve

stop with the rate hikes

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Q1: Which numbers in the #JobsReport stood out to you most? How is the labor market faring? #BeyondTheNumbers #JobsDay

Mike Mitchell

@MikeDMitchell2

We've had sustained job growth that has persisted in spite of aggressive Fed rate hikes. We've averaged over 400k jobs a month over the past year after taking into account new BLS revisions. These are good things!

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Q1: Which numbers in the #JobsReport stood out to you most? How is the labor market faring? #BeyondTheNumbers #JobsDay

The huge jobs added number! It reiterates what was already clear: we don't need high unemployment to bring down inflation. Another lesson: Thank god we were so aggressive on fiscal stimulus and relief. It has helped the labor market weather the storm while inflation faded

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Q1: Which numbers in the #JobsReport stood out to you most? How is the labor market faring? #BeyondTheNumbers #JobsDay

Trying to force an aggregate demand/supply model to explain the whole story just doesn’t work. All that the specifics and all the details about how supply and demand shocks filter through the economy. How do supply and demand interact with particular markets/institutions?

Of course, I don’t think “supply or demand” tells the whole story anyway. Some supply shocks translate into inflation , some don’t. Higher demand can mean higher prices or higher quantity. The distribution matters: who is benefiting from higher demand, restricted supply?

Seems like a potentially more compelling way to isolate a Phillips curve relationship. But doesn’t change main takeaway. Unemployment dynamics are not a quantitatively large contributor to inflation. How could you look at this and conclude robust stimulus wasn’t worth it

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Arin Dube

@arindube

Jan 31

The Phillips Curve signal is easier to extract with cross-sectional variation like here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf [we find something similar in our paper.] But w/ a bunch of other shocks, explanatory value of PC is lower. U-rate explains <1/4 of price rise in the paper.

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Is there a more updated version of this? Empirical tests of whether marginal costs increase? It’s a little bit shocking if we don’t actually have evidence that one of the most bedrock assumptions of neoclassical Econ is correct

Louis-Philippe Rochon

@Lprochon

Next Monday, for the

@MonetaryBlog

"Monetary austerity and the war on workers " By

@ProfDavidFields

and

@Lprochon

Rebecca Dixon,

- "UI is the first line of defense against poverty and homelessness."

Rakeen Mabud

@rakeen_mabud

Roses are red 🌹 The Fed wants a recession 📉 Jerome Powell's gotta stop 🛑 With this job loss obsession 😩 Slower rate hikes are not enough - the Fed needs to hit pause before we tip over the edge and put millions of workers at risk of joblessness.

And friendshoring? Give me a break. Now we are supposed to see operating global trade as a tool of American foreign policy as a good thing? Dividing up people into "good vs. bad" countries? I'm supposed to believe that colonialist, cold war crap is progressive???

The problem is that we never built in the labor market institutions such as unions that made those manufacturing jobs so good! The enemy of American labor is not foreign workers. It is American capital interests and the anti-labor stance of the American government.

And worst of all, the idea that globalization per se is the problem really skirt all the issues of power that are actually central to these questions! The main problem is not that the U.S. moved from manufacturing to services and services are in inherently worse jobs...

So, the answer cannot simply be "let's just blow up the global economy and the countries who depend on exports can sort it out."

For developed countries, foreign trade did dramatically reduce prices. For developing countries, obviously free trade, liberalization, and Washington Consensus were not the answer. That was bullshit. But access to global trade and export markets? Obviously hugely important

I'm all for the conversation about the benefits of free trade being way oversold. Of course. I'm all for the mainstreaming of industrial policy (it never *really* went away anyway). But let's be honest. Gains from trade are real.

Building resiliency into global supply chains and aggressively using industrial policy to boost the green and care economies, and greater economic sovereignty for developing countries = good. Absolutist protectionism or "friendshoring" to protect American interests? = Very bad

Jordan Zakarin

@jordanzakarin

This may be the worst headline I've ever read from any major national news outlet. The Times transforms DeSantis's aggressive, state-sponsored campaign of bigotry into a savvy brand-building venture by an edgy politician. nytimes.com/2023/01/31/us/

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Isabella M. Weber

@IsabellaMWeber

Our new paper tells the tale of the German Gas Price Brake, a policy to dampen the gas price shock based on recommendations of an expert commission I served on. According to official estimates, it's bringing down inflation by 1.5%. 1/ Open access: intereconomics.eu/pdf-download/y

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This indeed is part of the mechanism in our paper with

@guido_lorenzoni

We can get wage inflation > price inflation now to recover and because we have a profit margin cushion. In our setting this is also helped by the easing of supply constraints and prices of scarce inputs.

Ludovic Panon

@LudovicPanon

May 4, 2022

Yet another paper on markups and market power (drive.google.com/file/d/1JTZCtG) by a duo of European economists! How do cartels affect the aggregate economy? A thread.

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Some time ago a WSJ journalist calls me while I am on vacation to talk about an article he is writing on Market Power. After 2 calls, and more than 3 hours of conversation, he says: “I don’t believe your numbers for markups” 1/5

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Jan 31

Didn't fully appreciate how spoiled I was with Chinese (especially Sichuan) food in the Bay. But now finding some good DC options!

WISERPolicy

@WISERPolicy

Climate change: Women farmers cast aside

Despite being at the forefront of agriculture (and climate change) across the continent, African women farmers are often last in line when it comes to finding support while resources are dwindling.

foodformzansi.co.za

Despite being at the forefront of agriculture across Africa, women farmers are often last in line when it comes to finding support while resources are dwindling. They also doubt whether ongoing cli…

Exactly. And people are way overstating how late he was. He begins contact pretty much just past the boundary and his momentum carried him most of the way. Never mind how difficult it is to get that timing right. You let up too early, the QB can turn it up the sideline!

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Jesse Washington

@jessewashington

Replying to @SWEETJETE34

nah fam he’s chasing dude giving 200% trying to make a play and prevent the first down. honest mistake that came from effort not ignorance.

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Jake M. Grumbach

@JakeMGrumbach

I find these takes incredibly naive. Police have repeatedly rejected the “more money for more civilian control/accountability” trade. Reform has repeatedly failed because police cartel power blocks reform or makes it unenforceable. This is a much harder problem than you think.

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Noah Smith

@Noahpinion

Jan 29

More and more, I'm convinced that the big policing reform we need is to professionalize the police, through massively increased training requirements and higher education levels. noahpinion.substack.com/p/professional

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I know technically a penalty. But come on