March 2024 Economic Forecast: A Modest Improvement In Our Index Predicting Little Change In Main Street Growth

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Authored by Steven Hansen

EconCurrent‘s Economic Index modestly improved but continues insignificantly in negative territory. We continue to forecast that a recession is not imminent. One indicator (Conference Board Leading Economic Index) is no longer signaling a recession, but there remain three other major indicators that are.  Read on to understand the currents affecting our economic growth.

Nonfinancial Corporate Credit and Inflation: Part 1

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We have found that the correlation relationships between various types of credit and inflation are variable over time.  So far, the kinds of credit studied are government spending,1 consumer credit,2 and mortgage debt.3 Here, we address another category of credit spending, Nonfinancial Corporate Credit. This series studies the correlation between Nonfinancial Corporate Credit and CPI inflation.


Image by THAM YUAN YUAN from Pixabay.

Adventures With 3 Coin Flips. Part 8: Complex Systems (First Pass)

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NOTE:  This preliminary draft has been revised and expanded.  The finished article can be seen here.

The preceding post, Part 7, introduced some concepts applicable to complex system analysis. These included representations of reality and a property called ergodicity.  This article delves more deeply into the challenges that arise from these sources in modeling complex systems.

Adventures With 3 Coin Flips. Part 7: Reality and Ergodicity

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The complexity of analyzing a process as simple as flipping a coin three times raises concerns about how to describe reality in modeling.  In dealing with coin flips, we have a known probability for the result of each flip.  Also, many modeling scenarios may have more than three elementary steps.  Additionally, the probabilities associated with elementary steps may not be known.  How does this complicate the modeling process?  This review will address that question with specific emphasis on social science models, especially economics.

January 2024 Economic Forecast: Our Index Turns Slightly Negative

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Authored by Steven Hansen

EconCurrent‘s Economic Index again declined and is now slightly in negative territory. Being slightly in negative territory is not necessarily indicative of a recession, and we continue to believe a recession is not imminent. There remain four major indicators signaling a recession.  Read on to understand the currents affecting our economic growth.

The State of Joe Sixpack in 3Q2023: Joe Should Feel Financially Better Off

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Written by Steven Hansen

The Federal Reserve data release (Z.1 Flow of Funds) – which provides insight into the finances of the average household – shows a decrease in average household net worth from the previous quarter but up from one year ago. Our modeled “Joe Sixpack” – who owns a house and has a job, but essentially no other asset – is better off than he was a year ago.

Finding Economic Justice

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Locke abandoned the Doctrine of Economic Justice and replaced it with an analysis of the conditions that yield the justice of property rights. To which Marx, the Socialists, (and their predecessors) retorted: let us rather analyze the injustices of property rights. These are the contours within which the legal, social, economic, and political discourse has been carried out during the last few centuries. We might get out of this chasm, through an analysis in three parts. In Part I, we outline three fundamental mistakes in Marx’s analysis; in Part II, we analyze the existence and conditions of economic rights as generators of just property rights; in Part III, we complete the Theory of Economic Justice by adding the plank of Participative Justice to the two traditional planks of Distributive Justice and Commutative Justice.