Political Economy

The maneuvering over the UK's exit from the European Union continues unabated. The latest news inside the UK is that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is considering tabling a no-confidence vote against the minority government of Conservative…

Theresa May won the Conservative party confidence vote today by a tally of 200 in favor versus 117 against. While she can now continue on as Prime Minister, the fact that 117 Conservative Party MPs, more than a third of her party, voted…

We now have a Conservative Party vote of confidence by secret ballot scheduled for tonight in the UK. Enough Tory MPs sent letters to the 1922 Committee chair to trigger the vote, throwing the Brexit outcome into further turmoil. But there…

The latest news out of the UK is that British Prime Minister Theresa May has decided to postpone a Parliamentary vote on the deal she negotiated with the EU over the terms governing Britain's departure from the EU. Had the vote gone ahead,…

I am going to do a book review of an econ book that has just come out. And I think it’s fitting that my first post on the return of the Credit Writedowns ‘blog’ is a review of such a good book like “The Myth of Capitalism”. I started…

This was me in October: The right narrative here is that the Republicans will lose very badly. And so, expect gridlock, political trench warfare, in the US starting in 2019. That’s going to be a significant factor controlling how well the…

In recent months, I have mostly written about short-to-medium term outlooks. Part of that is because making medium-to-long-term predictions is hard. But I just saw three tweets on the political economy of 2018, each making a case for how to…

Let me run something by you. I was thinking about the economic implications of the US midterm election this morning when I happened across various accounts about Donald Trump's press conference yesterday. A lot of the focus was on his…

The US midterm elections last night saw the biggest turnout for a midterm in at least half a century because voter enthusiasm was high. But it was high because the United States is very polarized right now about the job performance of…

There isn't a lot of economic news out today, so let me focus today's piece a bit on the economic and social messaging ahead of the US midterm elections. What about the economy? I was in the car just now, listening to the radio, when a…