The very word “remittance” has a musty sound. People who experienced mail orders before credit cards may remember a note from Sears or Montgomery Ward asking us to “please remit an additional $2.79.” Or we may think of “remittance men,”…
Category: Other
Pulling apart job data
Tuesday’s news on Minnesota’s unemployment rate and job gains was welcome. Our state’s economy clearly continues to strengthen. The dramatic drop in the state unemployment rate and record increases in some job numbers need to be taken in context, however.…
Moral hazard gets personal after storm
Estimating risks and managing moral hazard are the essence of the insurance business. That is easy to say when discussing moral hazard in a microeconomics course. When you personally are subject to hazardous moral temptation, it is more complicated. That…
Was the boom just an echo?
The money supply is like one of those long balloons that skilled people can twist into entertaining shapes. Once you blow a certain amount of air into the balloon, it is going to show up somewhere. You can squeeze down…
Don’t blame OPEC, cows for price hikes
Price increases for only a few items do not constitute inflation. Keep that in mind when considering news of price hikes for specific goods such as milk or gasoline. Remember also that inflation results from excessive growth in the money…
Funding fundamentals don’t apply to state
The Minnesota Legislature is ending work on its biennial “bonding” or “capital improvements” bill. It considers such spending for building long-life physical facilities separately from appropriations for day-to-day government operations. This distinction between capital and non-capital spending, common in state…
Nothing magic about infrastructure
Is spending money on infrastructure always a good idea? Many apparently think so based on reaction last week to my criticism of spending $2.3 billion for new locks on the Mississippi River. A typical e-mail argued, Maintaining/upgrading our infrastructure is…
Import teaching tool
Among my tools are two versions of a little device called a “thumbwheel ratchet.” They illustrate, in microcosm, issues raised by international trade. While both do the same job, one costs seven times as much as the other. The two…
You can trade steel but not haircuts
While reading Brazilian newspapers on the Web last week, I noticed a curious coincidence. One morning, I read in U.S. periodicals that higher steel prices are pressuring U.S. manufacturers and that milk prices are rising. That evening, I read about…
Army Corps seems ready to barge in with costly overhaul of locks
This week’s announcement by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that it wants to go ahead with a $2.3 billion overhaul of locks on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers illustrates the economics and politics of large water projects in…