Edward J. Strafaci ~ Academic Blog

A top House lawmaker said Thursday he expects to advance his bill to eliminate the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reforms in the House, despite any legislative fights. Jeb Hensarling, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told reporters Thursday there was also   broad agreement with his counterparts in the Senate and at the White House on his bill to repeal and replace the regulatory reform laws. The chairman, however, stopped short of naming the specific policies that all three parties agreed upon. Instead, the Texas Republican said both of his counterparts -- Mike Crapo, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin -- were supportive he put his Financial Choice Act forward this week, and that many of the administration's principles on financial reform "mirror" provisions of the bill. Related: Republicans face uphill battle in seeking to kill Dodd-Frank A top priority for the Trump administration is to driv...

WASHINGTON — A  white cloth napkin , now displayed in the National Museum of American History, helped change the course of modern economics. On it, the economist Arthur Laffer in 1974 sketched a curve meant to illustrate his theory that cutting taxes would spur enough economic growth to generate new tax revenue. More than 40 years after those scribblings,  President Trump  is reviving the so-called Laffer curve as he announces the broad outlines of a tax overhaul on Wednesday. What the first President  George Bush  once called “voodoo economics” is back, as Mr. Trump’s advisers argue that deep cuts in corporate taxes will ultimately pay for themselves with an explosion of new business and job creation. The exact contours of the plan remained murky and Mr. Trump will not produce a fully realized proposal on Wednesday. But what the president has called a tax reform plan is looking more like a tax cut plan, showering taxpayers with rate reductions without o...

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Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Shuttering at a Record Pace Years of overbuilding and the rise of online shopping have come to a head; malls as ‘energy suckers’ By Suzanne Kapner April 21, 2017 7:53 p.m. ET American retailers are closing stores at a record pace this year as they feel the fallout from decades of overbuilding and the rise of online shopping. Just this past week, women’s apparel chain Bebe Stores Inc. said it would close its remaining 170 shops and sell only online, while teen retailer Rue21 Inc. announced plans to close about 400 of its 1,100 locations. “There is no reason to believe that this will abate at any point in the foreseeable future,” said Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies for Columbia Business School and a former executive at Sears Canada Inc. and other department stores. https://www.wsj.com/articles/brick-and-mortar-stores-are-shuttering-at-a-record-pace-1492818818

Could Inflation Actually Increase? Apr. 11, 2017 8:38 AM ET Ronald Surz   Hedge fund analyst, registered investment advisor, pension fund manager, momentum Experts see inflation persisting into the future at its current level of about 2.5%. Quantitative easing (QE) is about to be unwound, allowing interest rates to increase. The prospect of increasing interest will stimulate borrowing, increasing inflation. I attended a conference last week where one session was on inflation. The presenters were certain that inflation in the foreseeable future would be 2.5%. Why? Because that's what it's been and there's nothing that will change that. A monetarist would disagree. There are several things that can change inflation. Let's look at the one factor that I believe will increase inflation. The  monetarist formula  for the macroeconomic drivers of inflation is: PT = MV where P = price level (inflation) T = Transactions, M = mone...