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Why Consumption Has Been Sustained

The permanent income hypothesis in its RatEx-no liquidity constraint version says that consumption will adjust upward fully in response to a windfall. This will mean it will take a while to decumulate the “excess savings” transferred during the pandemic. How much remains? Here’s a guess from Torsten Slok:

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Capture and Ideology, Debt Ceiling Edition

In my first published peer-reviewed article, Peter Navarro and I argued that both economic special interests and candidate ideology separately could explain Congressional voting farm subsidies (we also applied the framework to domestic content legislation for automobiles), following Kalt and Zupan (AER 1984). In the ongoing discussions of how many members of the Republican caucus would vote for the (yet to be released) debt ceiling bill, I wondered how one would test the separate effects.

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