The Angry Bear

Using the stock market and unemployment as an easy and timely coincident recession indicator  – by New Deal democrat My fellow forecaster Bob Dieli has a measure he calls “DeltaDelta,” basically an average of the YoY% change in the stock market and the unemployment rate (which hopefully he won’t mind me mentioning here). It called to mind that occasionally in the past I have noted that a YoY decline in stock prices is a yellow flag for a...

Patients already paying price for PBMs diverting copay cash meant for needy, WSYX, Part 3, Darrel Rowland Part 3 of a 3-part investigation adding the detail of what is occurring with the PBMs. In a nut shell, Patients are told that they can avoid huge out-of-pocket spending for their drug and obtain their prescription for free. Yet what may not be clear to patients is that their deductible, coinsurance, and other out-of-pocket obligations are...

There has been much laughter over the fact that Donald Trump has repeatedly given the impression that he thinks that stealth technology works at the wavelength of visible light, so stealthy aircraft are invisible. He isn’t the only one who is saying silly things based on ignoring wavelength. The technology used by the F117, F22, and F35 does not hide planes from world war II era radar. The old radar used long wavelength waves. They are reflected...

A few years back, my chairman was a big enthusiast of NFTs (nonfungible tokens). In one conversation I recall, I pointed to a picture of the founding chair of the department and suggested he could digitize it and sell it to alumni as an NFT. He said he thought that was a good idea. When I laughed, he said “I’m not joking.” I replied: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”NFTs have always been an example of The Greater Fool Theory of investing, which holds that...

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an expert on Russian and Eastern European history. Yesterday, he narrated an essay on his subscription-only Substack site “Thinking about . . . “ on the occasion of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the US and expression of gratitude for UN support. Snyder believes that we should be thanking Ukranians....

This is the second part of the ABC 6 On Your Side web series on hidden reasons for high drug costs, we’ll show you why you may never see that aid. If you had time, you may have read Part One. It covered how Ohio HB 135 lingered till it died by not taking the bill up in the Senate Health Committee. A bill designed to cut drug prices for many Ohioans HB 135 won unanimous approval in the House last year. The  bipartisan passed measure with 60...

People tend to say things are bad and getting worse. They tend to get irritated when I note that the thing they mentioned is bad but has recently become less bad. There is some deep unwillingness to accept that levels, changes, and rates of change are different. Certainly people will argue that something is too low because it has decreased (see military spending over GDP) or getting worse because it is bad (see again military spending — different...

The long awaited downturn in multi-family construction may finally have happened  – by New Deal democrat With the relative fading of manufacturing in importance to the US economy, the leading construction sector has assumed even greater importance. And the most important data about construction are the leading, and long leading, data about residential housing construction. To give a little additional framework, typically the first data to...

This is Part 1 of a three-part story of how politics and delays backed by commercial interests and business sponsor groups delayed and eventually killed a bill meant to aid Ohio citizens. Kind of a forerunner to what may happen if Congress ever promotes a bill for healthcare-for-all. I will post the other two parts over the next two days, We sought a cause of death for HB 135. We found it … and something far bigger, WSYX, Darrel Rowland Part 1...

The 2022 Globie: Money and Empire by Joseph Joyce Every year we name a book the “Globalization Book of the Year” (aka the “Globie”). The prize is (alas!) strictly honorific and does not come with a monetary award. But announcing the award gives me a chance to draw attention to a recent book—or books—that are particularly insightful about globalization. Previous winners are listed at the bottom of the column (also see here and here). This...