It has been a good week on the inflation front. First we had a flat month for the Consumer Price Index — zero inflation in July. Then we saw an actual decline in the Producer Price Index. Naturally, there is a lot of pushback against the good news. I’ve been seeing many warnings against…

This is not the end of inflation. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported something we haven’t seen since the depths of the pandemic recession: a month without inflation. That is, the average…

The other day, my CUNY and Stone Center colleague Branko Milanovic suggested that it would be interesting to “compare Napoleon’s continental blockade against Great Britain to the current sanctions against Russia.” As it happened, I was already on the topic. I had just read Andrew Roberts’s …

After all the false starts and dashed hopes of the past two years, I’m reluctant to count my chickens before they’ve actually been signed in the Oval Office. Still, it appears that Democrats have finally agreed on another major piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. And if it does…

The US economy is not currently in a recession. No, two quarters of negative growth aren’t, whatever you may have heard, the “official” or “technical” definition of a recession; that determination is made by a committee that has always relied on several indicators, especially job growth. And as…

There’s a pretty good chance the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces the numbers on gross domestic product and other macroeconomic data, will declare on Thursday, preliminarily, that real G.D.P. shrank in the second quarter of 2022. Since it has already announced that real G.D.P. shrank in…

As president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi saved the euro. In my estimation, this makes him history’s greatest central banker, outranking even the former Fed chairs Paul Volcker, who brought inflation under control, and Ben Bernanke, who helped avert a second Great Depression. In a…

Until just the other day, Republicans and conservative media loved, just loved talking about the price of gasoline. Indeed, “Remember how cheap gas used to be under Trump?” became a sort of all-purpose answer to everything. Is there now overwhelming evidence that the former president conspired in a…

Interest rates are up. Stocks, especially glamour stocks, like Tesla, are down. And the crypto crash has been truly epic. What’s going on? Well, many people I read have been offering an overarching narrative that runs something like this: For the past 10 or maybe even 20 years the Fed has kept…

The sultans of Silicon Valley are in a political snit, with some billionaires suddenly turning against Democrats. It’s not just Elon Musk. Other prominent players, including Jeff Bezos, have lashed out at the Biden administration, and we now know that Oracle’s Larry Ellison participated in a call…