Donald Byrne

DONALD BYRNE was a retired Professor of Economics at the University of Detroit Mercy and held a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Notre Dame. He taught at other institutions, including: University of California-Berkeley, Notre Dame, Wayne State University, and Walsh College. In 2003, he helped launch an economics and finance oriented online newsletter: EconNewsLetter.com. He also served on several financial-institution boards and as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. A devout Catholic and family man, Dr. Byrne passed into eternity on May 7, 2018. May God rest his soul.

Numbers Can Be A Curious Thing

Numbers Can Be A Curious Thing

The monthly national employment numbers are posted by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics [typically] on the first Friday of the month with the preceding month’s data. These days, a key statistic has been the Labor Force...

An Unworkable Paradigm

An Unworkable Paradigm

A few weeks ago the U.S. Department of Treasury released its latest estimate of the budgetary deficit for the fiscal year ending Oct. 31, 2011. Once again it revealed an extremely large deficit of which the majority of members of the European Union...

Nothing Is New Under The Sun

Nothing Is New Under The Sun

Soak the rich if we can agree on who they are; 999 is the way to go; flat tax rate or bust; and on and on it goes.  This current crop of tax proposals is not new.  Huckabee, Forbes and others from previous elections, put forth similar ideas. ...

Decontenting and Fooling No One

Several years ago, we examined inflation data that showed retailers were having trouble passing on rising costs incurred at the wholesale level.  The traditional pattern of the Producer Price Index (PPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had...

Refloating the Titanic

The Fed recently announced that it would ‘twist’ the yield curve. “The Committee intends to purchase, by the end of June 2012, $400 billion of Treasury securities with remaining maturities of 6 years to 30 years and to sell an equal amount of...

What Is Happening In The Cradle Of Democracy?

What Is Happening In The Cradle Of Democracy?

Is there a contagion spreading across democratic nations? Rights without responsibilities is the new cry. Trillions for redistribution; not a penny for job growth. Alexis de Tocqueville could see it coming way back in the early 1800s. “The American...