We all know the World Cup brings people together, but can it actually heal deep societal divides? 📈⚽️ We break down the economic research showing how a national team's success can reduce ethnic conflict and build a stronger, more unified national identity 👇🧵www.nominalnews.com/...

McCloskey on why economics doesn’t have a textbook that can be recommended for people to learn economics I agree- the reason is that economics is a method of formal thinking. That’s why textbooks that focus on models or ideas, and not on how to build the model, become obsolete.

How The World Cup Builds Nations 1/3

This is actually not true. Immigrants in a country (and investors) that pay taxes would also be considered foreigners in this model. So labor and capital taxes are also paid by ‘foreigners’.

My thoughts on Jerome Powell and why I think he was good Fed chair. What really stood out to me was his openness to research and ideas: www.nominalnews.com/p/jerome-pow...

I promise you that if you read this primer on inflation, you will know more about inflation than 99% of pundits and podcast hosts -

Given the wide breadth of perspectives on what Kevin Warsh meant about interest policy, Fed communication is already worse.

I think people are significantly misjudging how bad the ‘taskforces’ announced by Kevin Warsh will be. It's undermining the work of all economics. It's like having a ‘taskforce’ for child vaccine schedules.

My quick take on the FOMC meeting and the press conference by Kevin Warsh www.nominalnews.com/p/special-ed...

Oof - we have slower growth and high inflation currently. Also, Q1 GDP, even at 1.6% is ‘artificially’ inflated due to the fact that in Q4 2025, there was a government shut down. Adjusting for this, GDP growth was around 1.2%.

PPI (Producer Price Index - the prices producers receive) increased by 1.3% month over month (not annualized). On a last 12 month basis - this is 6%. Honestly, I'm starting to lean that a rate hike this year should be in order. The risk of inflation unanchoring is increasing.

Inflation in the US came in very hot, with core (i.e not including food and energy) at 2.8 percent. Two comments: 1/5

We can now more comfortably evaluate the impact of tariffs on the US economy, and, unfortunately, as economists had predicted they’re not good: - Prices are up possibly by more than just the tariff; - Inflation is up; - Wages are lower; - Consumers are significantly worse off 1/2

Unemployment Rate in April stayed at 4.3% Number of added jobs in April: +115,000. The US Economy keeps ticking along. I wonder if the recent positive change is driven by the tariffs being voided. Also, with inflation being higher, interest rate cuts should be off the table.

Powell stated that tariff inflation will disappear in inflation readings in the next two quarters. Personally, I think the tariff inflation shock will dissipate at the end of 2026 (assuming no new tariffs and an expiry of all tariffs). A slightly later timeline according to me.

The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates fixed. What’s interesting to see is the debate positioning in the statement. Three of the voters are de facto telling that there is no reason for rate cuts at all. (and they’re probably right for the next 12 months). Image-Nick Timiraos

I feel like this should be bigger news than it actually is - tariffs ended up being a tax levied by corporations on tax payers in the US.

Research shows that social norms around women’s ambition still influence economic outcomes and influence the gender pay gap. 1/3

Tariffs do matter for inflation. It's been well over a year since the beginning of tariffs, and we continue to see the impacts of tariffs on inflation.

It feels like the genAI marketing campaign might end up hurting the genAI businesses themselves. Seems like a classic case of short term gains vs long term losses.

Two recent economic papers find that U.S. regions most exposed to Mexican import competition saw higher mortality, especially among working‑age men and elderly adults: 1/5

Question (that might have an incorrect premise): one of the reasons cited why search engines appear to be worse is due to ads being boosted. If that's the case, would this happen with GenAI searches or is there something inherently prohibiting that?

As it’s been a year since the ‘liberation day’ tariffs - had we not had tariffs: - inflation would be around 0.4-0.5% lower; and - interest rates would be around 0.4-0.5% lower as well. And this is not an April Fools’ post.

On X/Twitter there is now debate if economics itself is rigorous (a week after one economist criticized all other social sciences). My view is that every field has rigorous research (and also not rigorous research). 1/3

March CPI (headline inflation) might print a 0.8…

My belief continues to be that for something that needs real precision, the current technology is not going to cut it.

They made an AI documentary where they're interviewing CEOs of genAI about the dangers stemming from genAI. The dangers from sports betting/prediction markets are far more real - why don't we have a documentary with their CEOs?

H-1B visa (the ‘high skilled’ immigrant visa in the US) is in the news again. You may see plenty of analyses suggesting why ‘wage’ immigration requirements can make the program ‘better’. 1/3

The OpenAI-Walmart partnership, which failed, could have been prevented if OpenAI had hired economists Econ-based thinking would tell you that consumers value consistency (while genAI helps with discoverability). This is one of the reasons we have ‘sticky’ prices!

Great news - Washington State banned non-competes. A rare type of policy decision which makes everyone better off!

One of the reasons I love Economics is that you find results that are not intuitive like this one here - adding an extra road lane will not change how much time you spend in traffic jams!

Does adding a new lane reduce congestion? Surprisingly, the answer is no. Empirical research found that adding an extra lane gets offset perfectly by more vehicles on the road, keeping congestion the same. How is this possible? The biggest cost on most roads for drivers is time. 1/5

The Georgia DOT recently suggested that widening the highway would ease congestion. Turns out - that won't happen. www.nominalnews.com/p/expanding-...

I don't think people are prepared for the March CPI (Consumer Price Index, i.e. inflation number). 0.62% growth is 4 months of inflation in 1 month.

Why are markets more hawkish than the Fed? The Fed does not take a stand on war length. The markets have expectations. The Fed reacts to data as it comes in; the market assumes what data will come in. In this case, I believe the markets are ‘right’.

Thanks to advances in medicine, HIV has become a manageable virus. A daily pill basically stops the spread of HIV and also allows a person with HIV to live a full life. 1/6

Immigration helps fill in worker preference gaps, not labor shortage gaps.

A recent paper on housing supply and prices is causing quite a stir, as it suggests that inequality is the driver of high house prices and not just supply. It’s…probably correct. 1/3

Ah - less investor oversight is always better for everyone….

Fraud in venture capital backed startups is a growing problem. Economists have shown that this is due to fall in oversight by investors driven by reduce investor ownership and simply too many investors.

A deep dive into Chilean politics. An interesting thread in Chile, which is similar to many other countries, is that a good-intentioned, but ineffective technically leader can lead to significant blow-back.

After the dust settles - I think work from home will have a bigger economic impact than genAI. (I think a part of the genAI productivity boost is driven by WFH)

NYC is proposing a new tax for house purchases between $500k to $1mln (currently homes trading above $1mln have a transaction tax). Buyers won't be worse off from this is because house prices will fall to offset the tax. One estimate suggests prices fall by double the tax amount.

Interesting paper - it appears that just policies on their own might not be effective. Constantly informing about the policy is even more important (here policy uptake doubles after the information campaign)

This sounds like a bit of a problem….a predictable problem

You may be wondering if there's been an increase in fraud at startups, especially with high profile cases like Theranos and FTX. Research has shown that an increase in founder-friendly boards is the likely culprit. Founders have more control with less investor oversight 1/2

If you’ve been seeing more news headlines talking about fraudulent behavior of CEOs and founders at startups, it turns out there is a reason - over the last two decades, investors have been ceding control to founders, which increased fraud likelihood!

The ‘new’ US immigration policy will now more closely resemble the EU immigration (based on migration numbers) policy. Many like discussing the causes the EU has ‘lagged’ the US with economic performance (regulations etc). 1/2

CEO of Anthropic - “50% of all entry-level Lawyers, Consultants, and Finance Professionals will be completely wiped out within the next 1–5 years." I feel like this gets repeated every month for the past year. No reasonable economic model can generate what the CEO is saying.