socialist-economics

Before war ravaged Yemen, Walid Al-Ahdal did not worry about feeding his children. At his hometown near the Red Sea, his family grew corn, raised goats and relied on their own cow for milk. But for the last four years, after fighting forced them to flee, their home has been a tent at a camp with 9,000 other families outside the capital city of Sana. Mr. Al-Ahdal has struggled to buy adequate food with his wages as a janitor at a hospital. Now another war — this one more than 2,000 miles away — has upended their lives again. Food prices are soaring. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the cost of wheat has more than doubled, while milk has climbed by two-thirds. On many nights, Mr. Al-Ahdal, 25, has nothing to feed his 2-year-old daughter and his three boys, ages 3, 5 and 6. He consoles them with tea and sends them to bed. “My heart hurts every time my child looks for food that is not there,” Mr. Al-Ahdal said. “But what can I do?” The hunger gnawing at families in war-torn countries like Ye...

via Bloomberg Fed rate hikes and strong dollar are hurting global growth Emerging economies are especially vulnerable as capital leaves By Enda Curran and Amelia Pollard May 14, 2022, 5:00 PM EDT The soaring dollar is propelling the global economy deeper into a synchronized slowdown by driving up borrowing costs and stoking financial-market volatility -- and there’s little respite on the horizon. A closely watched gauge of the greenback has risen 7% since January to a two-year high as the Federal Reserve embarks on an aggressive series of interest-rate increases to curb inflation and investors have bought dollars as a haven amid economic uncertainty. A rising currency should help the Fed cool prices and support American demand for goods from abroad, but it also threatens to drive up the import prices of foreign economies, further fueling their inflation rates, and sap them of capital. That’s especially worrying for emerging economies, which are being forced to either allow the...

  Rent Increases Up Sharply Year-over-year, Pace may be slowing Higher Rents will impact measures of inflation in 2022 CalculatedRisk by Bill McBride May 3 Rents have increased sharply over the last year, and this is likely due to both demand and supply issues. Also, rents dipped in 2020, so some of the recent increase is making up for the 2020 decline. For example, the Zillow measure of new leases is up 16.8% year-over-year in March, but is up 8.8% annualized over the last 2 years. What drives demand for housing is household formation . Even though population growth in 2020 and 2021 was dismal, household growth appears to have picked up. A few possible reasons for household growth include: Some younger adults probably moved in with their parents or relatives (or stayed with them) during the worst of the pandemic in 2020 and started moving out in 2021. Divorces might have increased in 2021 splitting households. Unfortunately, we will not have data on household formation for some ti...

This is a free edition of  Slow Boring  a daily newsletter about politics and public policy. If you enjoy it, please consider buying a  subscription . Discounts are available for  students and educators  with a .edu email address, for  public sector workers with a .gov email address , and for  small groups  of four or more. Overtreatment in American health care is a problem An entrepreneurial, market-oriented system has some downsides. Matthew Yglesias May 2 One of my tweets last week was, unlike most of my tweets, generally popular and well received by progressives. It made the point that one of the structural features of the American health care system is that it's a basic consumer business, which means giving people medicine that they don't really need can be very lucrative. Apparel companies want to sell you lots of clothing; American doctors and pharmaceutical companies want to sell you lots of treatment. Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias America's capitalist, profit-orie...