The Congressional Budget Office has published "The 2019 Long-Term Budget Outlook" (June 2019), which offers a chance for a quick overview of where US government spending, taxes, and debt are headed in the next 30 years. For those who have been paying attention, there are no bombshell revelations here. But for thus just arriving at the party, the patterns may be eye-opening.
Three years ago on June 23, 2016, the Brexit vote occurred. After three years of negotiation, I have no clear idea what the endpoint will be. But to commemorate the day and some of the choices to be faced, here are links to a three earlier posts on Brexit.
When enthusiasts talk about the merits of being connected to the internet, they often emphasize benefits involving access to economically relevant information, political empowerment, cultural links, and family ties. But in the real world, people are watching cat videos. The Economist magazine has an article discussing how the main use of the internet in low-income countries, as in high-income countries, is the leisure-time activities of "timepass"(June 8, 2019).
Fossil fuels store energy until they are burned. Solar and wind power generate electricity, but don't store it. As a result, they are intermittent sources of electricity, requiring back-up generation capacity that is typically still supplied by fossil fuel. Could hydrogen become a way of storing energy from renewable power sources? The International Energy Agency, in a report on The Future of Hydrogen, describes what would be needed to make this happen (June 14, 2019, accessing report requires free registration).
"Global primary energy grew by 2.9% in 2018 – the fastest growth seen since 2010. This occurred despite a backdrop of modest GDP growth and strengthening energy prices. At the same time, carbon emissions from energy use grew by 2.0%, again the fastest expansion for many years, with emissions increasing by around 0.6 gigatonnes. That’s roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions associated with increasing the number of passenger cars on the planet by a third." Spencer Dale offers these and other insights in his introduction to the the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. It's one of those books of charts and tables I try to check each year just to keep my personal perceptions of economic patterns connected to actual statistics. Here are a few figures that jumped out at me.
Gross domestic product is not the total amount of output produced; instead, it is a a measure of what is bought and sold in markets. Pretty much every intro class in economics will point out to students that when I clean my own house, cook my own meals, look after my children, or or mow my lawn, that "household production" doesn't show up in GDP. But if I hire someone to do household production tasks, then that output gets counted as part of GDP.
The European Central Bank continues to disproportionately inflate the debt bubble of the Eurozone, while the economic slowdown of the main European economies worsens. What was designed as a tool for governments to buy time in order to carry out structural reforms and reduce imbalances, has become a dangerous incentive to perpetuate the excessive spending and increase debt under two very harmful and wrong excuses: That there is no problem as long as debt is cheap and that there’s no inflation.