economics

And from 1991 to 2019, Japan’s broad money supply never grew more than 5% year-over-year. Even last year in 2020, during this pandemic era of actual money-printing, Japan only grew their broad money supply by a little over 10% during the year, compared to 25% during the year for the United States.

Part of this historically slow broad money supply

Overcapacity in low-end production has plagued other Chinese tech industries, as well. The most recent example is artificial intelligence, which Beijing designated as a priority industry in its last two five-year plans. In August 2019, the government called for the creation of about 20 AI “pilot zones”—research parks that have a mandate to use

To put this in historical perspective, we note that the type and size of grants-in-aid have varied over a period of time. There have been five different types of grants: (a) revenue deficit grants, (b) grants for local governments, (c) grants for disaster management, (d) sector-specific grants and (e) State-specific grants. Except for the revenue

To motivate economic agents, governments therefore have to set up bait: in the form of subsidies and regulations. And bait, especially in the form free government money, always attracts profiteers, scammers, and fraudsters. It is something like an iron law in economics: for every governmental scheme to hand out money, there’s a scheme to game the

In addition, the US greatly restricts the supply of physicians by requiring that they undertake at least eight years of expensive post-secondary education and then an additional three to seven years of training in residency; in Europe, a medical degree can be obtained in six years. Furthermore, because of these stringent, perhaps overzealous,

New technologies often interfere with the smooth operation of the capital cycle.

Re-fi dominates capital raising for new investment projects by around 3:1 and, hence, imposes a shorter business cycle than the traditional 9-10 year cycle associated with the replacement of capital goods. As a result, they suggest that the business cycle is more a cycle in the changing duration of the capital structure than fluctuations in the

The reason firms hire lawyers at $800/hour rather than paying per brief is that the quality of legal reasoning cannot be specified ex ante in a contract. You're buying access to judgment, not a deliverable. You are buying lawyers who all went to Harvard Law because that carries with it a promise of indefinable quality. The same problem reappears

Hobson and Conant argued that the leading capitalist economies turned to imperialism primarily in order to export surplus savings and import foreign demand as a way of addressing the domestic savings imbalances.