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Marc Lavoie's new book on the foundations of Post-Keynesian economics is out entitledPost-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations. I learned a lot from the last version of this book and Marc has told me that he's been working hard to update the new one in light of more recent developments in both Post-Keynesian and mainstream economics.

Markets drifted sideways in the red for the most part on anemic volume and at times zero volatility.

By 4 pm the session ended down, quiet and headed nowhere. Hard to guesstimate where Mr. Market will take us tomorrow, but look forward to anther lackluster session I think.

Start-ups typically create jobs so fast at the beginning of recoveries that even a modest drop in that pace can affect the whole economy. In fact, slower job growth among new businesses may have resulted in 760,000 fewer jobs in the first year of the current recovery. Because housing wealth is an important factor in the financing of new businesses, lower house prices may have been partly to blame for the slower growth. Conversely, recently increasing house prices may already be boosting start-up growth and, with it, overall job growth.

by Mary Amiti, Oleg Itskhoki, and Jozef Konings - Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The Japanese yen depreciated 30 percent from its peak in the fourth quarter of 2011 against its trading partners. This was expected to boost its exports as the lower yen makes Japanese goods more competitive on global markets. Instead, the volume of Japanese exports of goods actually fell by 0.6 percent over this same period, as can be seen in the chart below. Weaker external demand surely contributed to this poor export performance. Yet over the same period, U.S. goods exports grew by more than 6 percent, which suggests that other factors are also at play.

Markets have traded sideways since the opening with the averages trending fractionally downward. Volume has dropped to anemic levels and appears to be another quiet trading day.

The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index for June 2014 - which forecasts employment for the next 6 months - again strengthened. The rate of year-over-year growth improved, and this was the fifth month in a row of improvement in the three month rolling average rate of growth.

Premarkets were down -0.30% and opened the same way. The SP500 was down -0.35% by the 15 minute mark on moderate volume. The $VIX jumped from 10.27 to 11.25 during the same time period as market weakness prevails.

By 10 am the markets remained depressed and trading sideways on low volume heading towards anemic status. This could be just a consolidating phase for an oversold market before moving upwards again.

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary "reading list" which will include very brief summaries of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for "reading list" items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.

This is another short post on MMT, a sort of follow-up to my post from a couple of days ago. There was an interesting response to various comments on my piece, which was posted up on Mike Norman's website.

While the group stage of this year's FIFA World Cup in Brazil proved immensely entertaining and delivered the highest goals-per-match average since Mexico 1970, the matches in the round of last sixteen turned out surprisingly dull. 

Though the small cap market as a whole has been down lately, one sector appears to be rallying and surpassing the others. That's right - health care companies, a mainstay of small cap indices, is on the rise. Barron's even called it 'the place to be.'

Gadagadei village, in the state of Odisha, is inhabited by Juangs, one of a number of tribal groups in India that are counted as being particularly vulnerable. It is remote, surrounded by forests, and has poor communication and transport links. With limited access to services, Gadagadei village - and many others like it - has suffered the death of newborns and mothers who might otherwise have been saved.

The recent report that the US housing inflation bubble has slowed is just another case of the pundits and the media running with bad data, in this case the worst housing indicator in the world, the Case Shiller Index.

Every month I'm obligated upon the release of Case Shiller to correct the record. This index reports the 3 month average price of officially recorded sale prices at county courthouses. Here at the end of June, that's data for February, March, and April, in other words the average price for the period with a time mid point of mid March. Since sales typically take about 45-60 days to close, the Case Shiller Index represents the average contract price for somewhere around mid to late February. It is now late June. Do we care today where the 3 month moving average of the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in late February? Remind me again why a 3 month average house price in February is relevant now?

Econintersect editor's note: One of the solutions for too much debt is to write down the debt. It can be in the form of a debt Jubilee (such as discussed by Steve Keen and Michael Hudson, among others) whereby debt is simply cancelled - lenders lose an asset and debtors lose a liability. The problem is, of course, determining which debtors are let off the hook and which creditors take the loss. The following rant from Doomstead Diner suggests a possible course of debt wealth destruction that might play out to the detriment of the middle class and the moderately wealthy.

U.S. crude production in April 2014 was 8.4 million barrels per day (bbl/d), with two states, Texas and North Dakota, accounting for nearly half of this total. Texas production topped 3.0 million bbl/d for the first time since the late 1970s, more than doubling production in the past three years, and North Dakota production broke 1.0 million bbl/d for the first time in history, nearly tripling its production over the same period, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration's Petroleum Supply Monthly report.

Cutting-edge methods could revolutionize how babies are made.

Here's a fun fact:

A Russian gas deal with China won't change that - as we'll highlight below.

But before we get to the nitty-gritty, let's dive into a story that's right at the tip of your finger, quite literally...

I'm talking about your keyboard.

Insider buying edged up slightly last week with insiders buying $29.59 million of stock compared to $29.36 million in the week prior. Selling declined with insiders selling $819.56 million of stock last week compared to $856.32 million in the week prior.

Sell/Buy Ratio: The insider Sell/Buy ratio is calculated by dividing the total insider sales in a given week by total insider purchases that week. The adjusted ratio for last week dropped down to 27.7. In other words, insiders sold almost 28 times as much stock as they purchased. The Sell/Buy ratio this week compares favorably with the prior week, when the ratio stood at 29.17.

According to the World Health Organisation, the most recent outbreak of the Ebola virus has proven the deadliest on record.