The Angry Bear

– by Jerusalem Demsas Many individuals wrote in and complained about the new law which would have given more power to builders, CAI, CCMC, etc. If you read the bill below, you will see it has major flaws in it. I wrote and asked the legislature to deny this bill. It would not stop builders from making the same decisions and even less appropriate decisions with regard to lots, etc. Secondly, this has little to do with the military writing a...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Personal income and spending has become one of the two most important monthly reports I follow, because it nets out the impacts of higher interest rates and abating inflation due to the unlinking of the supply chain. To repeat, the big question this year is whether the contractionary effects of Fed tightening have just been delayed until this year. Or whether the fact that there have been no rate hikes...

Starting April 1, fast-food workers in California will be paid at least $20 an hour, thanks to legislation passed last fall that raised the industry-wide minimum wage. Why? “the difference between the prices consumers pay and the cost of production—have increased sharply over the past decade of growth for the industry.” Roosevelt Institute Open Thread March 24 2024 Shorter Work Week – Is It All It Promises to Be? – Angry Bear...

– By Tom Walker “The Unknown Unknown Marx,” EconoSpeak Toward the end of his 1968 essay, “The Unknown Marx,” Martin Nicolaus quoted Marx’s enumeration of four barriers to production under capital that “expose the basis of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital.” Nicolaus qualified what Marx meant by overproduction to be “[not] simply ‘excess inventory’; rather, he means excess productive power more generally.”...

by Antonio Ciaccia 46brooklyn Research A January Unlike Any Other In case you didn’t notice from our last report on new year price changes, at the end of December 2023, many insulin vials and pens took significant (i.e., 75%+) list price decreases. Given much of the early 2024 attention on brand drug list price increases, it bears repeating that insulins in 2024 are largely a quarter of the price they were in 2023. This cratering of prices...

New drugs go through clinical trials before they can be marketed. Phase I trials are for safety. Phase II/III trials are for efficacy. If a drug fails these trials, it can’t be sold.One challenge to drug testing is trial enrollment. Ideally, the subjects should be demographically representative. The problem is that there can be significant variation among trial participants that is not reflected in sex, age or ethnicity.Drugs have a half-life in the...

 – by New Deal democrat The divergence in the trends between initial and continuing claims continued this week, as the former continued their somnolent good news, while the latter had a slightly disconcerting pop. Initial claims declined -2,000 to 210,000, and the four week average declined -750 to 211,000. On the other hand, with the usual one week delay, continuing claims rose 24,000 to 1.819 million: The first two are in the same range...

Back when we lived in Chapel Hill NC, we made a few trips to the Outer Banks where my wife had an uncle who built fishing boats in Buxton NC. Back then, nobody was talking about sea levels rising because of global warming and yet it was obvious back then (early 1980s) that these sandy beaches were ephemeral and the buildings that overlooked them were at risk. The iconic Hatteras Lighthouse had to be moved away from the encroaching ocean back in...

by David Zetland The one-handed economist Schools tend to go to one extreme or another when it comes to grades: they are either confidential or posted openly. The reasons for confidential tend to involve self esteem, privacy, peer pressure and bullying. The idea is that students will be mean to each other if they know the grades of others. This idea is a bit flawed — students can be mean in many ways, grades are feedback on work rather...

by Dean Baker CEPR Not much of a surprise here the 11 Washington Post’s Charts need some explaining to correct the misinterpretation of them by WaPo. The issue here is the amount of bad or false information floating around in the news media today. People tend to believe what they initially read and go no further. When people like Prof. Dean come along and correct the inaccuracies it can be misinterpreted as political. People want to believe...