Tag Archives: economics

reputable economic and financial (and or socio-environmental?) reports

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I’ve been putting together a list of reputable economic, financial, and energy reports, and it’s interesting so I’m pasting it below. What I think would be really neat would be to have an automated page or blog posting that tells you what the most recent of these reports (or ones from the last 30 days, 90 days or whatever) is and where to find it.

This is me working with the free version of Gemini, by the way, and not extensively fact checked, so any details or links below could easily be quite wrong! The easiest way I have found to paste a table like this into WordPress is to make a “Custom HTML” block and then ask Gemini (or whatever AI) to give me the table in HTML form.

The first list seemed to me to completely leave out any economy-environment links, so I asked it to suggest a few reports that provide these links. The results are not entirely satisfying, but I’ve included them below. There’s an “analytical lens” (ugh, barfy buzz words Gemini!) column that could be used to filter to just the most mainstream reports or the more environmental ones, if someone wanted to do that. The list can definitely be refined.

I screened out any typically issued more frequently than once a quarter or less frequently than once a year, with an exception for the bi-annual Living Planet Report. There are a total of 22, but since some are semi-annual or quarterly it would work out to a new report about every 10 days on average. I’m sure we could dig up a few more and get this down to once a week. Could be neat if I ever get an automated version set up!

Entity Report Title Analytical Lens Publication Frequency Focus & Core Value Landing Page
WEF Global Risks Report Mainstream Economics/Finance Annual (January) Survey-based analysis of macroeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental tail risks. WEF Reports Hub
Circle Economy / Deloitte Circularity Gap Report Mainstream Systems Analysis Annual (January) Mass-balance metabolic flow analysis tracking global raw material throughput vs. circular flows. Circularity Gap Page
World Bank Global Economic Prospects (GEP) Mainstream Economics/Finance Semi-Annual (January & June) Emerging markets, developing economies, debt trends, and global trade flows. World Bank GEP Page
IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) Mainstream Economics/Finance Quarterly (Jan update; April & Oct major; July update) Global growth forecasts, inflation trajectories, and structural macro risks. IMF WEO Landing Page
CBO The Budget and Economic Outlook Mainstream Economics/Finance Semi-Annual (Feb major; May/June update) Nonpartisan 10-year US economic growth, deficit, debt-to-GDP, and interest rate baselines. CBO Outlook Page
Federal Reserve Monetary Policy Report Mainstream Economics/Finance Semi-Annual (February & July) Statutory report to Congress covering US labor markets, inflation, and policy stance. Fed Monetary Policy Page
OECD OECD Economic Outlook Mainstream Economics/Finance Quarterly (March update; June & Dec major; Sept update) Advanced economy GDP forecasts, employment, and structural fiscal policy. OECD Economic Outlook Page
WMO State of the Global Climate Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (March/April) Physical climate indicators (temperatures, ocean heat, sea levels, severe weather impacts). WMO Climate Report Page
IMF Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) Mainstream Economics/Finance Semi-Annual (April & October) Global capital markets, banking sector risks, and financial liquidity. IMF GFSR Landing Page
Global Footprint Network National Footprint & Biocapacity Accounts Mainstream Systems Analysis Annual (Spring / April update) Carrying capacity accounting measuring humanity’s ecological footprint vs. biosphere biocapacity. Global Footprint Network Page
Federal Reserve Financial Stability Report Mainstream Economics/Finance Semi-Annual (May & November) Assessment of systemic financial leverage, funding risks, and asset valuation pressures. Fed Financial Stability Page
BloombergNEF New Energy Outlook (NEO) Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (May/June) Clean energy tech economics, grid investment curves, and battery cost modeling. BloombergNEF NEO Page
Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (June) The primary global energy production, trade, and consumption dataset (formerly BP). Energy Institute Review Page
BIS Annual Economic Report Mainstream Economics/Finance Annual (Late June) Central bank policy, global banking systems, and international monetary mechanics. BIS Annual Report Page
Potsdam Institute (PIK) Planetary Health Check Mainstream Systems Analysis Annual (September) System dynamics modeling of 9 planetary boundaries, tipping points, and Earth subsystem interactions. Planetary Health Check Page
IEA World Energy Outlook (WEO) Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (October) Long-term global energy transition demand, supply, and net-zero technology pathways. IEA WEO Landing Page
ZSL / WWF Living Planet Report Mainstream Environmental Economics Biennial (October, even years) Scientific measurement of global biodiversity trends, population dynamics, and ecosystem integrity. ZSL Living Planet Page
UNEP Emissions Gap Report Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (October/November) Global greenhouse gas commitments vs. actual emission reductions required for Paris targets. UNEP Emissions Gap Page
NGFS Climate Scenarios & Macroeconomic Risk Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (October/November) Central bank models linking climate physical/transition risks directly to macro GDP & inflation. NGFS Scenarios Portal
Global Carbon Project Global Carbon Budget Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (November) Peer-reviewed global tracking of fossil CO2 emissions, land-use change, ocean sinks, and carbon budgets. GCP Carbon Budget Page
UNEP State of Finance for Nature Mainstream Environmental Economics Annual (November/December) Audits public & private capital flows, mapping economic investments vs. natural capital loss. UNEP Finance for Nature Page
Vanguard Economic and Market Outlook Mainstream Economics/Finance Annual (Dec) + Quarterly Updates Secular economic trends, neutral interest rate estimates, and asset class return models. Vanguard Research Page

June 2026 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The latest paper from Johan Rockstrom and company lays out climate scenarios through the year 3,000. There is plenty still to be figured out about the scientific details, but some major uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases – in other words, how much warming will occur per unit of emissions – and how likely the major feedback loops are, such as melting permafrost releasing massive amounts of methane, loss of sea ice reducing reflection of sunlight in an accelerating loop, and major shifts in ocean currents that distribute and rebalance heat across the planet. These are existential risks, and they can potentially reinforce each other in multiplicative ways. So even though there is scientific uncertainty over whether it will get bad, or really catastrophically bad, there is no logical or moral case for not taking precautionary action now to reduce the risk of these outcomes.

Most hopeful story: If AI does in fact accelerate productivity and create significant new wealth, there are many well-known effective policy options for redistributing this wealth. Some of these have the word “tax” in their names, but there are also less efficient but perhaps more politically palatable options like baby bonds. Perhaps if the rate of new wealth creation is really a major departure from the past, our system may have a chance at implementing some of these.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I wanted to teach my own children not only some basic financial literacy concepts (Johnny wants ice cream today but is trying to save for a new bike) but also how those relate to the idea of a capitalist economy (why does interest exist, what causes inflation, and what the heck is money anyway?) and the real physical world (yes, little Johnny, the consequences of taking natural resources out and putting pollution back into our biophysical system are in fact intertwined with our human economy). A daunting task, considering that Nobel laureates have struggled with this. But the Nobel laureates aren’t going to explain it to the children, so your intrepid blogger waded in and came up with something.

my summer 2026 experiment with financial and economic literacy education for a young audience

This is a Google Slides experiment. I’ve come up with a summer financial and economic literacy thing for kids. It’s easy to find basic financial literacy content, but my idea here is to link those ideas to concepts like time value of money, endogenous growth, and ecological economics in a way that is accessible to an elementary to middle school audience. And honestly, an intelligent but unaware adult audience, because I don’t think most adults have a conceptual understanding of these concepts. It is a test of my own conceptual understanding if I can explain them clearly to children. This has been a challenge, and I am certainly happy to hear feedback on my attempt.

William Murphy: Who Rules America?

This is a really interesting description of how our global “neoliberal” or “market capitalist” economic and financial system functions. I’ll try to summarize with a sprinkling of quotes for my own understanding, but the article really is quite eloquent and I recommend reading it.

  • The finance industry sits on top of everything and essentially sets to operating rules that everybody and everything else in the system must follow. When I think “finance” I picture banks and insurance companies, but he refers to “large institutional investors and asset managers”. These are the actual owners of capital, or the nervous system that sort of organizes networks of owners, which includes most of us I suppose through pension funds, etc.
  • Corporate management does the bidding of the finance industry, such as “decisions about automation, outsourcing, wage suppression, or expansion”. These determine how “value is captured”. It includes “[m]ajor corporations in technology, energy, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and defense”.
  • Governments provide essentially a predictable, enforced legal structure for this system. This includes “monetary policy, fiscal intervention, legal frameworks for property rights, and, crucially, the capacity for coercion through military and policing institutions”. The government also serves as a shock absorber in times of crisis, making the whole system more resilient.
  • Political leadership functions to essentially sell this system to the public, through acceptable forms of messaging and through a certain amount of misdirection so it is just not talked about too much, and so the public dialog does not range outside certain bounds that are acceptable to the system. No matter where the political winds seem to be blowing on the surface, this deeper, implicitly accepted ideology tends not to shift much over time.

From a light skim of the article, a reader might get the sense that Mr. Murphy admires this system. But he frames it in terms of a ruling class controlling the rest of society. I can admire this system to a certain extent – it certainly is good at “capturing value” that is potentially out there and probably would not be captured as thoroughly by another system. It also leads to “capture” of that value by a small minority, leaving a significant portion of society in relative squalor when there is actually plenty of value to go around. And some of the “value” it extracts is actually undermining the biophysical system that it sits inside, so that it will eventually kill the host it is feeding on. So the question in my mind is whether these two major flaws (distribution of wealth/value and environmental destruction) can be solved by tweaks to this system. If not, its apparent stability and efficiency on the surface is an illusion in terms of supporting the long-term well-being of the majority of humans on this planet.

This is where the singularity bros will tell us the “end of scarcity” will solve both of these problems in an almost magical way. I want to believe this, and I think we can hope for this but we better also have a plan for the case where it doesn’t happen.

Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters

I am always trying to puzzle out how the financial and real economies are related, and how the loss of functioning ecosystems may eventually put the brakes on both – hopefully, in theory, with the financial markets acting as some sort of cushion where prices rise and allow some degree of adjustment that reduces the onset of actual physical shortages and severe hardship. Anyway, I heard an interview with Warwick Powell recently that seemed to cover some of this. Below is the Goodreads description of his most recent book (which I haven’t read).

Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters: Rethinking Theory, China and International Geopolitical Economy

In an era when the old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born, Thermoeconomics in a Time of Monsters delivers a groundbreaking reframing of political economy through the unforgiving laws of thermodynamics.

Warwick Powell argues that all social-economic systems are fundamentally energetic and metabolic. Their reproduction, stability and resilience are perpetually threatened by entropy—the natural tendency toward disorder and energetic dispersion. Successful societies survive and thrive through deliberate negentropic energetic renewal, efficiency gains, and institutional arrangements that convert energy surpluses into sustained order.

Building on classical concerns with value, surplus, production and circulation, Powell develops Systemic Exchange Value (SEV) theory. Money, information, supply chains and fictitious capital are reinterpreted as energetic phenomena. The result is a coherent ontology that integrates thermodynamics, endogenous money and information theory.

I often hear the claim that classical economics “ignores” or “doesn’t know about” land, energy, natural resources, or ecosystem services more generally as an input to production. I don’t think this is exactly true, they just choose to assume these factors are negligible compared to labor and capital, and they have some sound evidence that this assumption has been reasonable over the past couple centuries. What could change their minds is if the assumption becomes unreasonable because high prices or outright shortages of food, water, energy, and/or the physical environment’s ability to absorb our wastes becomes a large factor relative to labor and capital. Then maybe that will force a merger between the abstract models of economics and the iron laws of our actual physical universe. But is it possible that incorporating these factors in advance could help us head off the crisis? You might want to try to invent a parachute before you jump off the cliff, not while you’re in freefall.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249361440-thermoeconomics-in-a-time-of-monsters

Goldman Sachs year in review

Rapacious corporations sometimes put out interesting infographics. I wonder what it takes to get a job like this in one of these corporations, where I assume most jobs are not like this. Anyway, this entry from Goldman Sachs has some interesting ones. I’ve screenshotted a few interesting graphics – this is fair use and I am steering people to your publicly posted info, please don’t sue me guys!

What the heck are stablecoins?

https://www.goldmansachs.com/pdfs/insights/goldman-sachs-research/2025-4-themes-in-charts/2025-summary.pdf p. 18

So basically, a bank or bank-like entity is allowed to take a dollar and issue you a digital currency that you can spend just like a dollar. Crucially, it appears that they have to keep your dollar as a dollar or invest it in U.S. Treasury bonds while they are holding it. So they can make interest on your dollar and you cannot, but they can’t actually create new money by issuing more stablecoins than people give them dollars.

U.S. government debt interest payments are historically high

https://www.goldmansachs.com/pdfs/insights/goldman-sachs-research/2025-4-themes-in-charts/2025-summary.pdf, p. 23

We often hear “debt is X percent of GDP”. But this is comparing a stock and a flow, so there is no reason 100% has any meaning as a benchmark and it certainly does not mean the entire economy is being spent to service the debt. This measure is really a proxy for interest payments as a percent of GDP. This is really the “hangover” from past spending – what we are spending on interest can’t be spent on anything else, and we can’t really control it in the short term. What is really concerning here is that the high interest payments of the 1980s might be explained by high interest rates, but the debt payment level never came down as interest rates came down during the historically low interest rate period since then. Now interest rates are spiking, and this is directly sucking dollars away from real priorities. So clearly, we have to either “grow our way out”, reduce spending, and/or increase taxes (and/or tariffs) if we want to reduce this number. But reducing spending, increasing taxes, and putting up trade barriers all tend to decrease growth in the near term so this is the conundrum. The government can just create money of course, but this tends to be inflationary and at the moment, we appear to be in the midst of a spiral of inflationary expectations that is not going to go away soon. Thanks Biden…but really thanks Obama, Trump and Biden administrations for making the necessary hard choices to stimulate the economy and head off panic during the financial and Covid-19 crises. This has left less slack to deal with the next crisis though – the current number may be sustainable absent an external shock, but of course external shocks happen. The only good thing about external shocks is they sometimes tend to reduce interest rates. By the way, this section of the publication concludes by showing that government debt is not a uniquely U.S. problem.

The Federal Reserve has a Geopolitical Risk Index

https://www.goldmansachs.com/pdfs/insights/goldman-sachs-research/2025-4-themes-in-charts/2025-summary.pdf, p. 40

Basically, it is just counting the number of newspaper articles mentioning geopolitical conflict in a specified number of “papers of record”. I suppose it provides a somewhat objective measure to ground discussions on interest rates for them. But it could be useful for the rest of us to gauge whether our impressions of geopolitical instability are matching the evidence.

going to college is still a lot better than not going to college

I hear people “questioning the value of a college degree” in the media. Sure, education is getting more and more expensive at a time when wages seem to be stagnating and there is some uncertainty whether career prospects for today’s graduates will be similar to those of past generations. But the numbers say (paying to study and not work for four years and) getting a degree is still a much better investment than not getting a degree and going right to work after high school. Sure, you could borrow the cost of four years of college and bet it on cryptocurrency or the Super Bowl, and you might come out ahead, but you might also come out living a short life under a bridge somewhere. You could also train as, say, an electrician and probably have a decent income and successful career, but you would still probably do better in the long run as an electrical engineer.

Anyway, this is from the Financial Times, which I still seem to have residual access to from my own recent student career.

To determine whether recent graduates are having an especially tough time in 2025’s low-hiring environment, the comparison we should make instead is with others who recently entered the labour market for the first time, regardless of age. A newly job-seeking graduate might be in their mid-twenties, but someone entering the world of work straight from high school will be several years younger.

Once we do this, it turns out that those without a degree are actually having a much harder time of it. In the US, unemployment among recent college graduates is up 1.3 percentage points from its mid-2022 low, but by almost double that among recent labour market entrants without a degree, who have seen a 2.4 point rise. This is very different to the much more modest 0.7 point rise among the frequently — but inappropriately — cited group of non-grads in their mid-twenties who are sheltered from today’s harsh hiring conditions.

But evidence for the kind of large-scale AI-driven displacement of early-career knowledge-sector jobs that would explain broad-based graduate malaise remains conspicuous by its absence….When viewed instead as a broader cooling of the labour market, in which inexperienced workers of all stripes bear the brunt (and especially those with the least skills) we don’t need to reach for such exotic explanations. The unwinding of extremely tight post-pandemic labour markets, rising input costs from inflation, tax changes and tariffs, plus the broader economic uncertainty during Donald Trump’s second term, are sufficient to explain what we’re seeing.

AI-related changes to the job market and wider economy are almost certainly coming, in my view, but we may be perceiving a causation between today’s technology and economic/political headlines that is not quite happening in real time.

entropy economics

John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, has a new book called Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production. The ideas are not really new, as he admits:

As we and others have said before, from a physics perspective, resources are low-entropy materials (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). The entropy law holds that systems tend towards higher entropy states spontaneously. Living systems, as non-equilibrium systems, need to extract low-entropy materials from the environment to compensate for their continuous dissipation.

We are taking concentrated resources from the Earth’s biophysical system, using them to perform useful work, and producing waste products which consist of less concentrated substances and heat which are too diffuse to use for useful work, and in many cases cause harm to the system. Entropy must increase at the scale of the universe, but organized systems like life and human civilization can get away with decreasing it on scales that matter to us short-lived primates, if not to a dark, cold universe that most likely doesn’t care about us (revealing my atheist stripes here, sure if you are religious that helps to solve this existential dread problem, and good for you!) There is a scale where the impact of our human economy becomes large relative to the physical system it is embedded in, and the economic theories we have based critical decisions on have chosen to neglect that to this point. Economists might say, our equations can account for that, we have just chosen to neglect it and we have clearly stated our assumptions. Well, those assumptions no longer hold as we approach or pass the point of no return.

Many others have made these points. In addition to Georgescu-Roegen – a few that come to my mind are Herman Daly, Howard Odum, Brian Czech, Jay Forrester and the authors of World3, to name a few. But these voices have been ignored by mainstream economists because they were from other disciplines, did not have the right credentials, or did not make their arguments at a time when the prevailing body of thought was receptive. So it probably helps to have one more credentialed academic economist make them for the audience of academic and professional economists at this particular point in history. Today’s students will be tomorrow’s professionals. Economists are very, very important. For better or worse, their opinions and choices and advice to policy makers shape our world. Maybe at a time when the public has become less receptive to these ideas even though the crisis has rapidly worsened, the economics profession could be ready to listen. I don’t know, but it’s worth another try.

University of Chicago Press

house sale price premiums by month and city

Zillow has some data on how much above average home prices are by month of the year and by US city. In general, prices are higher by about 1-3% in March-June. I assume this has something to do with the U.S. school year. It may be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Last time I was in the home buying market, which was almost exactly 10 years ago, I started looking for listings in January, but there really was nothing to look at until March. So people in my city (Philadelphia) don’t start listing until March, and by the time you go through the process it seems like most closings are going to be in the May-June time frame (precisely when mine was). I wonder if refinancings show up as home sales in this data though, or if they have some way of knowing when the properties actually change hands. That could skew the data because people can refinance any time of year, and they are likely to refinance when interest rates are relatively low and prices therefore relatively high.

total factor productivity

This is mostly a review for yours truly, partly as I am pondering whether there is any economic theory or strategy that could justify the Trump federal budget cuts and tariffs. My verdict: no, I don’t think so, I think they are based on simplistic ideas: linear, short-term, misguided thinking about the national debt and trade deficits. Anyway, here are a few quotes from the IMF:

It’s a measure of an economy’s ability to generate income from inputs—to do more with less. The inputs in question are the economy’s factors of production, primarily the labor supplied by its people (“labor” for short) and its land, machinery, and infrastructure (“capital”). If an economy increases its total income without using more inputs, or if the economy maintains its income level while using fewer inputs, it is said to enjoy higher TFP…

Recent IMF research shows that TFP growth has slowed around the world since the global financial crisis. In low-income developing countries, it has come to a virtual standstill in recent years…

TFP is higher in countries where the average worker has more years of schooling, the quality of education and training is better, and the workforce is healthier. These advantages enable the average hour of work to generate more economic value added—in addition to improving the quality of life more broadly…

So what can advanced economies do? First, they should “do no harm,” by avoiding policy mistakes, such as permitting a decline in market competition, with powerful firms using their monopoly positions to stifle entry and innovation, or reverting to costly trade protectionism. Beyond this, policymakers should craft regulations that tap the possible productivity benefits of recent innovations in green technology, information and communications technology, and artificial intelligence. They should also tackle remaining barriers restricting the opportunity for women and minorities to bring their talents and innovative potential to all sectors of the economy.    

So, a long-term strategy to boost productivity and national wealth could be to invest in childcare and education (the people who will come up with tomorrow’s innovations, and also their parents who can’t come up with today’s innovations because they are too busy), research and development. The current U.S. administration is cutting all these things. Investing in infrastructure and physical capital also helps if you have underinvested in it in the past – there is a diminishing return to these investments, but the U.S. can’t be anywhere near the diminishing return. It also makes sense to invest in a counter-cyclical strategy – more when private sector unemployment is higher and less when it is lower.