What we’re reading (11/3)
“Fed Prepares Rate Cut Amid Economic Contradictions” (Wall Street Journal). “Federal Reserve officials are expected to cut interest rates by a quarter percentage point at their meeting Thursday because inflation has continued to make progress toward their 2% goal. Officials began lowering rates at their previous meeting in September by making a larger half-point cut. They are trying to figure out where, exactly, rates should settle after high inflation over the past three years led to a dramatic series of rate increases.”
“The Economic Philosophy Of Donald Harris” (The New Yorker). “In the nineteen-seventies, Harris became the first tenured Black economist at Stanford. He taught courses in Marxian economics, which was then an active field of research, arguing that it provided a more useful framework for analyzing the long-term dynamics of capitalism—how economies grow and how wealth gets distributed—than the theories promulgated in standard textbooks and courses. Harris, in his 1978 book, which surveyed a number of different approaches to economic development, wrote that the Marxian system, though incomplete in some essentials, ‘remains today as a powerful basis on which to construct a theory of growth of the capitalist economy appropriate to modern conditions.’ Nevertheless, much of his own theoretical work emerged from a distinct but related intellectual tradition, the post-Keynesian school, which was originally associated with some left-leaning British followers of John Maynard Keynes. Harris extended the post-Keynesian approach to developing economies, and he argued that a key feature of capitalism as an economic system was ‘uneven development,’ both within and across countries.”
“TGI Fridays Files For Bankruptcy” (CNN Business). “TGI Fridays Inc., the American casual dining chain, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Saturday. The company said in a statement that fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic was the ‘primary driver of our financial challenges’ and it will use the Chapter 11 process to ‘explore strategic alternatives in order to ensure the long-term viability of the brand.’”
“The Mysterious Fees Inflating Your Grocery Bill” (Wall Street Journal). “The price of a bag of coconut-cashew granola at Whole Foods jumped last year from $5.99 to $6.69. Why that happened defies simple explanation. The granola maker, Wildway Foods, said the cost of making the cereal hasn’t gone up that much, and that it isn’t pocketing more profit. It jacked up the price, it said, in large part to offset fees that piled up from a little-known link in the supply chain: grocery distributors. There were charges for processing grocery promotions, others for potential spoilage and still more related to alleged shipping glitches.”
“DJT Stock’s Sudden Crash Wipes Out $2.4 Billion From Donald Trump’s Wealth In Just 3 Days” (Fortune). “The recent collapse in shares of Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, has ravaged Donald Trump’s net worth. He owns the majority of its shares, which trade under the ticker DJT, and the stock has been a barometer of the former president's prospects this election cycle. It soared as polls began tilting his way through most of October.”
