The Angry Bear

A New Norm: Senators Bernie Sanders and Laphonza Butler presented an intriguing idea: making a shorter work week a national norm. The bill they introduced proposes changing the standard workweek with no loss in pay for certain groups of employees, including many hourly workers, from 40 to 32 hours, at which point overtime pay would kick in. Whether that change sounds quixotic depends on whom you ask. But as Sanders said in a statement: “Moving to...

Wrong answers only: “saving” Originally Published at Wealth Economics In my last post, I tried to say precisely what the words “wealth” and “assets” mean as they’re used in this blog. This post tackles the question of wealth accumulation. Where does wealth come from? What are the mechanisms that create assets? Households and the accounting-ownership pyramid I realize first, though, that I left out an important issue in the last post: what...

Pretty much a rewrite to provide simpler reading and a better understanding for readers. My rewrite did not make it much shorter. It is taken from a recent 2025 Health Affairs article. The main thrust of this article being commercial Medicare Advantage insurance companies taking advantage of government payments for healthcare to Medicare patients. The other part being CMS doing more to resolve the issues. MA Coding for patients is set the year before...

New Deal democrats Weekly Indicators for March 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. I look at the high frequency weekly indicators because while they can be very noisy, they provide a good nowcast of the economy, and will telegraph the maintenance or change in the economy well before monthly or quarterly data is available. They are also an excellent way to “mark your beliefs to...

History and some excellent up-to-date reporting by Prof. Heather cox Richardson I am sharing here as I subscribe to her Letters from an American. She explains the efforts of a few, a minority of political actors who are attempting to sway the opinions of Americans with their stilted dialogue promoting right-wing beliefs. It should be ignored. However it is . . . – Prof. Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American In the past few weeks,...

 – by New Deal democrat There’s no big economic news today, but yesterday existing home sales were released. While they have historically constituted up to 90% of the entire market, they have much less economic impact than new home sales, which involve all sorts of construction activity, followed by landscaping, furnishings, and other sales. Since the Fed started raising rates two years ago, the two markets have gone in entirely different...

Hal Singer at Lever News wrote a commentary explaining how banks (mostly) are upset with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau capping credit card late fees at $8. One would think this covers every bank. It does not and only covers banks with more than 1 million card holders. Any bank or organization with less customers can avoid the new rule. And of course there are other exceptions. The new rule takes effect sixty days after being posted in...

Angry Bears’ Social Security expert Dale Coberly emailed this to me about the same time it showed up in my inbox. Republicans again are trying to sell the public on the need to cut Social Security and Medicare Budgets for those over 65. Cutting them while keeping the Trump tax breaks which will result in a $2 trillion deficit by the time Reconciliation measures end in 2025. The cuts makes no sense as both programs are far more efficient and effect...

 – by New Deal democrat Initial and continuing claims once again continued their recent good streak.  Bonddad Blog Initial claims declined -2,000 to 210,000, while the four-week moving average rose 2,500 to 211,250. Continuing claims, with the typical one-week delay, increased 4,000 to 1.807 million: While these aren’t the 50+ year lows we saw 18 months ago, they’re not far off. For forecasting purposes, the YoY% change for initial...

There will never be enough human kidneys available to transplant all the patients in renal failure who are on dialysis. While there has been considerable interest in xenotransplantation (sourced, in this case, from pigs), the barriers to sustainable transplant have so far proved insurmountable: these include immune rejection and activation of cryptic viruses. Now, thanks to genome editing, those barriers may now be overcome:“The pigs whose organs...