I have begun to keep a daily journal on my thoughts and feelings in the lead-up to my diagnosis and treatment of cancer, a dedifferentiated lymphosarcoma in the groin area.  Sharing these thoughts was not my first or second impulse until Bill encouraged me to keep notes of my progress and publish  them (from the  point of view on our medical system and the more personal journey in considering my own mortality and experience).
I have a second surgery scheduled for Jan. 27; and then about 4-6 weeks later, I start a course of radiation 5 days a week for 33 treatments.  I am greatful to have adequate insurance through medicare and medex blue cross/blue shield of MA. Dana Farber hospital has a bone cancer and sarcoma treatment center that has experience in my

(Dan here,,,at lunch the other day a friend asked about the great prices for stocks.  This post by Thomas Palley caught my attention as a well written post on the nuances between stocks and finance and the 80% who do not own many stocks and the economy of losers and winners. )

by Thomas Palley  (re-posted)
A Stock Market Boom is Not the Basis of Shared Prosperity

The US is currently enjoying another stock market boom which, if history is any guide, also stands to end in a bust. In the meantime, the boom is having a politically toxic effect by lending support to Donald Trump and obscuring the case for reversing the neoliberal economic paradigm.
For four decades the US economy has been trapped in a “Groundhog Day” cycle in which policy engineered new

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for January 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha
My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
The short term forecast has been volatile recently – and was again this week.
As usual, clicking over and reading rewards me a little bit for the effort I put in

(Dan here…reposted due to discussion in a previous thread)
CRS: Social Security: What Would Happen If the Trust Funds Ran Out?
Bruce Webb | July 21, 2015

Very interesting paper that I missed in real time.
Social Security: What Would Happen If the Trust Funds Ran Out?
Almost everyone who addresses this question assumes that the answer is pretty simple: if either of the Social Security Trust Funds goes to zero than benefits will automatically drop from ‘Scheduled’ to ‘Payable’ which translates to a 22-25% overnight cut depending on which Trust Fund we are talking about. But I had an interesting conversation with Andrew Biggs some years back. Andrew is a very prominent advocate of Social Security ‘reform’ which he sells on the basis that the system is

Scenes from the December jobs report: leading jobs sectors and wages
Let’s take a more detailed look at last Friday’s December jobs report.
First, as usual for the past few months, let’s look at the more leading jobs sectors. This month, let’s also take a more detailed look at wage growth and why it may have suddenly decelerated.
As an initial note, revisions going back to late 2017 are going to be available next month, and preliminarily it was already indicated that these will be strongly negative to the tune of several hundreds of thousands overall. In short, as weak as some of the numbers look now, they are likely to be even weaker when we see them next month.
Here is this month’s update to the three leading sectors of employment that I have been

by New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for January 6 – 10 at Seeking Alpha
My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
How week – or not – the next six months are going to be remains the primary issue.
As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you right up to date, as well as rewarding me a little bit for the effort I put in.

(Dan here…this is a post from 2007 by Old Vet, a regular at Angry Bear during this time period.  Pre Trump.  Peter Dorman reminded me of Old Vet, and Mike Kimel dared me to put this Old Vet post up.  Here it is.)
Old Vet on The Passion of Immigration
 November 19, 2007

This post is by OldVet…
—–
When you make a man into a monkey
That monkey’s gonna monkey around”
(Delbert McClinton song)

Call me a Monkey’s Uncle. Out of pure frustration with the name calling debate on immigration, I can’t help wanting to tweak some tails.

My daughter LittleVet is French/American and lives in Paris . She has a living great-grandfather named Franz who is German and a former Luftwaffe pilot in WWII who learned a bit of English as a POW working in Louisiana cane

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for December 30 – January 3 at Seeking Alpha
 My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.

There were marginal moves to the downside on both the producer and consumer sides of the ledger this past week.
As usual, clicking over and reading rewards me with just a little bit of $$$ for my efforts.

A response to Kevin Drum: for wages and inflation, it’s all about the price of gas
Last week Kevin Drum had the following inquiry:

[H]ow is it that wages can go up but overall inflation remains so subdued? That seems to be the real disconnect here. During the dotcom boom, wages went up but inflation remained around 3 percent. During the housing bubble, wages didn’t go up and inflation remained around 3-4 percent. Right now, wages are going up but inflation has remained around 2 percent. Wages no longer seem to have much correlation with overall inflation.
I haven’t seen anyone address this specific issue, but I’d be interested in hearing more about it…. What’s the deal?
The answer here, I believe, is quite simply that in the modern era since 1983,

By New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for December 23 – 27 at Seeking Alpha
My last Weekly Indicators post of the year is up at Seeking Alpha.
The producer side of the economy seems to be worsening, while initial jobless claims suggest some weakness is spreading over to the consumer side.
As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me a little bit for the effort I put in.

By New Deal democrat
Marking my 2019 forecast to market
One of the things I do at the end of every year, in the interest of transparency, is to go back and see how my 6 and 12 month forecasts for the year panned out.
So how did I do this year? Not perfect, but not too shabby either. I marked to forecasts to market Over at Seeking Alpha.
As usual, clicking over and reading puts a penny or two in my pocket for my efforts

by New Deal democrat
Weekly Indicators for December 16 – 20 at Seeking Alpha

My Weekly Indicators post is Up at Seeking Alpha.
Are we just having a slowdown, or actually slipping into contraction? The short leading indicators would like to have a word.
As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you up to the moment on the economy, and rewards me a little bit for my efforts.

By David Zetland (originally published at One-handed Economist)
Review: Secondhand
I read this 2019 book at record speed due to its breezy (“magazine”) tone and discussion of one of my favorite passions: reusing old stuff.
A few years ago Adam Minter wrote Junkyard Planet about the trash trade, but many readers told him about how they reused stuff rather than about their trash. Their passion led to this book (subtitle: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale) on the second-hand goods that are exported by businesses and non-profits in the US and Japan, via processors in India, to various Asian and African countries.
Perhaps the most important fact I learned is how little we know about the secondhand-world. Data is missing due to the “used” nature of the

By Joseph Joyce
The 2019 Globie: “Capitalism, Alone” by Branko Milanovic

The time to announce the recipient of this year’s “Globie” is finally here. Each year I choose a book as the Globalization Book of the Year. The prize is—alas—strictly honorific and does not come with a monetary reward. But it gives me a chance to draw attention to a book that is particularly insightful about some aspect of globalization.  Previous winners are listed at the bottom.
This year’s winner is Branko Milanovic’s Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World. (This is the second Globie for Milanovic, who won it in 2016 for Global Inequality.) The book is based on the premise that capitalism has become the universal form of economic organization. This type

By Eric Kramer
The Case for Carbon Taxes, Part II:  Political Sustainability
In a prior post, I argued that carbon taxes are not vulnerable to political subversion by hostile courts and regulators, and that this is an important advantage of carbon taxes over traditional regulation based on mandates, and also an advantage over subsidies.  Once they are passed, carbon taxes can work more or less on auto-pilot to drive a clean energy transition, unless they are affirmatively repealed by Congress.  In this post I consider whether carbon taxes are likely to sustain the support they need to remain in place.  There is certainly no guarantee of this; any ambitious climate policy is likely to remain controversial.  However, there are reasons to be optimistic that a

Via Naked Capitalism  comes an explanation of what income inequality looks like in the US.  It stands in contrast to the Bloomberg article pointed to by Yves in her introduction.  I pulled the quotes with a non-economic person in mind.

THE WOLF STREET REPORT    transcript of podcast by Wolf Richter.

Subprime doesn’t mean poor or uneducated. Subprime means having a credit score below 620…

(Dan here) For example:

Aggressive subprime lending went into overdrive starting in 2014, and private equity firms piled into it, and smaller banks went after it, and it’s now coming home to roost  . . .

This includes healthcare costs, and it includes food costs, and apartment rentals, and cars have gotten a lot more expensive, and the like. But cars and

By Eric Kramer
The Case for Carbon Taxes, Part I:  Political Subversion
Economists support carbon taxes on efficiency grounds.  By putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, a carbon tax creates a strong incentive for people reduce their carbon footprint.  They can do this by switching to clean technologies or simply by reducing their use of fossil fuels – by driving less or turning down the air conditioning, for example.  Other policies can also be used to get people to reduce their use of fossil fuels, but carbon taxes allow people to reduce their carbon footprint in the least costly way.  Given that decarbonizing the economy will be a large and expensive undertaking, keeping costs as low as possible is clearly important.
Economists have made some