Reading

What is happening now? The onset of the COVID-19 crisis highlighted the importance of having timely data on the economy to help policymakers make more informed decisions. However, the most comprehensive measure of activity, GDP, is published with a long lag, thereby limiting its value to policymakers as a measure of the current state of the economy. To overcome this information deficiency, we develop a monthly activity indicator (MAI) for Australia. The MAI aims to provide policymakers with a more immediate snapshot of prevailing economic conditions. We achieve this by using a dynamic factor model to summarise the information content from a curated list of 30 monthly predictors selected for their ability to explain movements in quarterly real GDP growth. We undertake a pseudo out-of-sample nowcasting exercise using the MAI in an unrestricted MIDAS model and find that nowcasts based on the MAI significantly outperform standard benchmarks. Crucially, outperformance is largest during the COVID-19 crisis, emphasising the benefit from considering monthly data.

Dear ES/PE community members, find below an abundant and excellent list of great academic opportunities: 14 calls for papers for conferences (some are partly funded) and special issues, 11 postdoc positions, 9 PhD scholarships and fellowships, 4 job openings, 3 summer schools, and a visiting fellowship in economic sociology, political economy, work and labor studies, […]

Source - Patreon

As we all watch with bated breath for Joe Biden to verbally stumble I thought I’d just take a moment to remind ourselves of the kinds of stuff that other guys says. Here’s one from a couple of months ago: “Our nation was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg. Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The battle of Gettysburg, what an unbelievable. I mean it was so, was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways — it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow! I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And uh the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice that? He’s no longer in favor. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill, he said. Wow, that was a big mistake, he lost his great general and uh they were fighting uphill. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys,’ but it was too late.” Trump goes on a weird rant about the battle of Gettysburg and then notes of Robert E Lee that "he's no longer in favor.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Is that good? Hardly. Is it catastrophic? Not really. That’s from 538. G. Elliott Morris, who runs the place, has this: It’s 120 days until Election Day, and our model thinks the presidential election could go either way. Right now, President Joe Biden is favored to win in 481 out of 1,000 of our model’s simulations of how the election could go, while former President Donald Trump wins in 516 of our simulations. There is still a small chance of the pure chaos scenario: In 3 simulations, no candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes, which would throw the election to the House of Representatives. It might not seem like it based on the panicked reaction to Biden’s poor debate performance nearly two weeks ago, but the election is still a considerable ways away. This means there is a lot of uncertainty about where the polls will end up on Nov. 5. In turn, the 538 election model puts a healthy amount of weight on non-polling factors such as economic growth and political indicators.

Seriously, it’s like a 4th grader’s book report — and the 4th grader didn’t read the book. Utterly embarrassing. Steve Benen does a nice job of succinctly critiquing it: The preamble: Before the blueprint begins in earnest, there’s a preamble, spanning nearly three pages, which appears to have been written by Trump himself. It’s filled with vapid, all-caps, bumper-sticker-style declarations, featuring a combination of vague goals and proposals that President Joe Biden has already delivered. Here it is. Definitely a Trump special. Replete with inappropriate caps and bad punctuation. Our Nation’s History is filled with the stories of brave men and women who gave everything they had to build America into the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. Generations of American Patriots have summoned the American Spirit of Strength, Determination, and Love of Country to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. The American People have proven time and again that we can overcome any obstacle and any force pitted against us.  … But now we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE.

The Trump-led 2024 Republican platform instead calls for an American Iron Dome and the largest deportation operation ever.

The post GOP Platform Doesn’t Mention the Word “Climate” Once — Even After Hottest Year on Record appeared first on The Intercept.

Climate change and rocket exhaust are seeding a light show in the northern skies.

The post Don’t Miss the Electric Clouds This Summer appeared first on Nautilus.

I would be interested in hearing from the legal beagles on this to know if there’s any possible chance they won’t be able to pull it off: Donald Trump is expected to launch a new legal battle to suppress any damaging evidence from his 2020 election-subversion case from becoming public before the 2024 election, preparing to shut down the potency of any “mini-trials” where high-profile officials could testify against him. The plans come after the US supreme court last week in its ruling that broadly conferred immunity on former presidents opened the door for the US district judge Tanya Chutkan to hold evidentiary hearings – potentially with witnesses – to determine what acts in the indictment can survive. In the coming months, Trump’s lawyers are expected to argue that the judge can decide whether the conduct is immune based on legal arguments alone, negating the need for witnesses or multiple evidentiary hearings, the people said.

The British Labour Party (BLP) won 32% of the vote but with First Past the Post voting it won 62% of the seats. That was the biggest gap on record between votes won and the number of seats. If the UK had preferential voting as we have, the result would have been much closer. The Continue reading »

Ukraine can only be saved at the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. Sadly, this point is not understood by Ukrainian politicians such as Oleg Dunda, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, who recently wrote an oped  against my repeated call for negotiations. Dunda believes that the U.S. will save Ukraine from Russia. The opposite is Continue reading »

My copy of Iris Chang’s THE RAPE OF NANKING is missing its collection of historical photographs. Having seen them once, I could not bear to see them again, nor risk my teenage son coming across them, so I ripped them from the book. Now, every day on social media that is not controlled by the Continue reading »

Before leaving the Labor Party, Senator Fatima Payman made it clear she did not sign up to a Labor Government whose caucus had not itself signed up to the Labor Party platform which required a recognition of the state of Palestine and a two-party solution to the Middle East’s endless malaise. She made that discovery Continue reading »

A week after Julian Assange’s release from Belmarsh prison, a boisterous gathering of 200 very happy Assange supporters packed the St Kilda Bowls Club in Melbourne to celebrate Julian Assange’s 53 birthday on July 3. Assange, who was in seclusion still recovering from his ordeal, did not attend. In his place, his father John Shipton Continue reading »

The most pressing problem we face is climate change. It’s even more important than – dare I say it – getting inflation down to 2 per cent by last Friday. But we mustn’t forget that climate change is just the most glaring symptom of the ultimate threat to human existence: our continuing destruction of the Continue reading »

Andrew Podger, former Public Service Commissioner and advocate for reforms that take account of recent failures in public administration, is circulating a paper on priorities for change. About thirty former senior public servants, most with senior Order of Australia postnominals, have endorsed, without necessarily adopting each specific suggestion, his paper as a basis for a Continue reading »

Melbourne tabloid The Age has done its already sagging reputation no favours by running, as an exclusive, an article that claims to detail what it calls the “denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors” – Israelis who were attacked by Hamas – with the centrepiece of the article being an interview with an Israeli reservist Continue reading »

Moves by other countries to impose higher tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles could benefit Australians shopping for a new car. Australian car buyers could be the beneficiaries of new tariffs the European Union has slapped on imported electric vehicles from China. The taxes of up to 37.6 percent which provisionally come into effect on July Continue reading »

Media critic and former ombudsman Margaret Sullivan has some thoughts on the media pile-on: It’s possible for two conflicting ideas to be true at once. And so it is with the mainstream media’s unrelenting focus on Joe Biden’s mental acuity, following his terrible debate performance earlier this month. First truth: the president’s stumble and the political fallout that followed is a huge, consequential news story that deserves a lot of coverage. Second truth: the media coverage is overkill – not only too much in quantity and too breathless in tone, but also taking up so much oxygen that a story even more important is shoved to the back burner. That bigger story, of course, is the former president’s appalling unfitness for office, not only because he tried to overturn a legitimate election and is a felon, out on bail and awaiting sentencing, but because of things he has said and done in very recent weeks. As just one example, he claimed that he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025, the radical rightwing plan hatched by some of his closest allies to begin dismantling our democracy if he wins another term.