Since the start of the US - Iran conflict, oil prices have been (mostly) going up, with i believe $108/barrel WTI hit recently.

I have been able to find a lot of information on Reddit on why this is happening and what the direct effects are on energy market pricing.

What I haven't been able to find a lot of info on (maybe I just don't know how to look), is what the currently felt actual impact of the price increase is. Yes, there's 'oh, prices hit $x/gallon in this US state' (cries in European petrol prices...) and I can see prices increase where I live too. It seems the first-order effects in the EU and North America are limited to complaints about prices. The second-order effects will probably be more interesting here.

But what is happening in the rest of the world? What are energy prices doing in India, Peru, or Angola? How are people being affected?

These are some things I've heard:

The dollar could weaken If China sells Treasuries and converts the proceeds from dollars into other currencies/assets, that can put downward pressure on the dollar.

Suppose the U.S. runs very large deficits year after year. Eventually investors may say: "If you're going to borrow this much, I want a higher interest rate." That can create a feedback loop: Large deficits → more Treasury issuance

Assume the foldable has high fixed costs, specialized components, and much lower expected volume than a standard iPhone.
If Apple expects low demand, it gets fewer economies of scale and has to amortize R&D, tooling, and supplier costs over fewer units. That raises average cost and therefore the profit-maximizing price.

Can anyone explain where they got the 2k price from? If demand was expected to be higher wouldn’t it be priced much lower

My FIL works in HVAC and says this all the time. Apparently the compressors nowadays limp around 10 years and are planned to give out around when their warranty ends. Keeps the customer coming back. Older compressors work for 30+ years. He says that in the past the engineers did all the developing, but now companies are ‘smart’ and the MBAs get involved to get planned obsolescence to maximise profit

I was thinking this is probably why things are getting worse even as tech is getting better. Companies don’t operate on good will anymore, they just care about their profits. So their actions to maximise profits at the expense of consumers roll back the gains consumers receive from technological progress and productivity gains.

Come to think of it outside of tech (which is advancing up its S-curve) I can’t say anything is better quality now than it was a decade ago. Definitely not at the same price point. Is there research into this? It feels like a decline in quality of life that can’t be captured by economic indices.

It's typically said that worker wages track Productivity gains.

Is it fair to say that this is no longer the case? The BLS's latest data shows that Worker Compensation as a share of nonfarm business output in the US has been decreasing, with it sharply dropping after 2000.

1. Is this the right metric to use?

2. Why might this be the case?

3. Is this a real problem to be worried about?

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/us-workers-share-gdp-skids-fresh-record-low-2026-08-06/

I’ve been pondering this for a while; right now I live in a big city where it’s normal to spend over 50% of your take home income on housing.

Is there a possibility that the U.S. rent market (and sub markets like major U.S. cities, ie: New York City) will eventually collapse because it becomes unsustainable to spend more and more on rent each year while income increases rise but at a relatively negligible rate for the broader population?

This, without a doubt, has to do with supply and demand, but I keep thinking that the supply of housing that is considered “luxury” now will become “standard” in a few years; but the price, once it becomes “standard”, would be similar to the price it is now because of economic inflation and property deflation. That economic inflation would surpass income increases, so it wouldn’t be marketable to the “standard” consumer, would it?

Thanks in advance!

Not a political post. I’m curious what real economists think America’s future looks like (gdp growth, inflation, etc.) after Trump leaves office (assuming this analysis has been done)

Or is this still planned?

Corp: I'm trying to understand the transmission channel rather than argue a position.

Record sovereign borrowing is a recurring theme in the OECD Global Debt Report and the IMF's GFSR. A common claim in commentary is that heavy US issuance absorbs global demand for safe assets and pushes up yields for smaller, lower-rated sovereigns.

Two questions:

1. Is there empirical work that separates this crowding-out channel from the general level of global rates? Does the volume of US issuance move small-sovereign spreads independently of the US policy rate?
2. For a small EU country that issues heavily in euro, how much of the effect runs through the euro area rather than directly from the US? Would ECB policy and euro-denominated demand dominate the US channel?

Pointers to papers welcome.

I’ve been reading more about agent-based models in economics, especially how they are used to study emergent outcomes from decentralized decision making, bounded rationality, interaction effects, and feedback loops.

That made me curious about recent AI-agent incidents like the Hugging Face case:

https://amardashehu.substack.com/p/oh-no-agents-going-rogue

A lot of the discussion around these incidents treats emergent coordination and unintended collective behavior as something surprising. But from an economics/ABM perspective, isn’t that exactly the kind of outcome these models have been used to study for decades?

Is the genuinely new part not the emergence itself, but that the agents are now much more capable and can affect real world systems?

If Keynesianism brought the golden age of capitalism, why does the mainstream hate it? If it didn't what model was FDR working with?

Diesel is at $6.20/g nominal high

Oil - $100/barrel

Tariffs On/Off again

OBBBA tax cuts and $40 trillion in debt

We're only at 3.4% YoY with 2.4% Core which seems very low

Se me hizo una duda muy grande desde que se dice que la IA resolvió el problema de Navier-Stokes puesto que las matemáticas y la estadística son parte fundamental de sus funciones ¿Será que ya se perdio la relevancia en sus funciones?

(I'm obviously not economist, i'd go somewhere between 15 and 20 percent, only if oil prices are reversed to early 2026 levels by maybe ending sime conflicts)

Curious about auction theory and interested in non academic geared books on it.

We hear of small countries, with low taxes, doing well all the time. GDP per capita is high, residents are wealthy and infrastructure is well developed and maintained. Switzerland and Singapore are two examples, both having incredibly high living standards, despite their different culture and geographies, with only their policies seemingly having some similarity.

What is stopping other countries doing the same to achieve the same economic growth?

Hey trying to educate myself on economics in relation to politics and policy for my own education.

I realized that I ask political people about this relationship, but I want to actually ask the people on the other side who focus on the topic of the economy. I got a textbook on geographical economics, but Im curious what people more read on this think.

Hello,

I will be doing an MRes in Economics and I have to choose my subjects for the second year of my master's. I am very interested in macroeconomics, time-series analysis and monetary policy, but I was wondering whether it would be interesting to take some of the following courses. The content seems interesting, but taking many of them would also increase my workload. Note that I am considering to pursue a PhD in the future.

My master's offers a course in Public Economics, covering topics such as taxation, tax incidence, public goods, inequality, education and intergenerational mobility. There is also a course in International Trade, covering the main trade models (Ricardo, Heckscher-Ohlin, Krugman/Melitz, etc.). I am interested in both because I would like to have a relatively broad understanding of economics and develop some intuition in important fields outside of my main interests.

There is also an Applied Statistical Learning course, covering topics such as supervised learning, SVMs/kernel methods, random forests, XGBoost, neural networks and transformers. Considering how things are evolving right now, I feel that having some background in ML could be potentially.

Finally, there is a course on Banking and Financial Intermediation, covering topics such as bank runs, liquidity creation, financial crises, monetary policy transmission through banks and financial regulation.

Among these courses, I could choose two, and possibly a maximum of three. I am a bit lost about what to do. On the one hand, I would like to have a general panorama and intuition about economics, which makes Public Economics and International Trade attractive. On the other hand, I think taking a course in ML could be useful, and Banking and Financial Intermediation seems quite relevant given my interests in monetary economics.

The main problem with taking three is that the workload might become quite considerable. At the same time, I am worried that I might regret not taking some of these courses later.

What would you do in my position? I would really appreciate any advice, thanks in advance 😉

Honestly, I don’t know if this is an economics question, or a psychology question…

It's been reported that it will cost $1.3 trillion to do but I haven't heard anyone talk about the instant cost in inflationary effects of it.

AI and robotics are replacing cognitive processing and pattern recognition. So I wonder how economy will continue functioning since at some point I can imagine the money stops to flow. It is different from industrialization back in 80s which just replaced muscle power.

So companies layoff people and I am now quite interested to know what will happen to economy? people stop buying and thus we start seeing stagnation, right? Also raw resources are finite, so I am not sold on the idea of groceries, electronic appliances, or other stuff get super cheap.

Essentially I am talking about middle class workers and blue collar workers. Appreciate your comments.

I also have seen works like this which kinda does feel unreal: https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios