The Angry Bear

This podcast came to me by way of Kip Sullivan, the expert on Traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage. We have had a running dialogue for about a year now. Most recently, Angry Bear featured Kip’s PNHP Single Payer Healthcare Financing Series detailing why healthcare is expensive in the US. I have put up numerous posts on healthcare, Medicare, Medicare Advantage. This podcast by Kip and Ralph Nader gets into the take over of Traditional...

Yet another one of those Matadors  Adorno’s metaphor of the “matadors of the culture industry” didn’t fall out of the sky. Nearly four decades earlier — sometime between 1931 and 1933 — he had written several short pieces, one of which was titled “Applause.”  I came across mention of it when I was looking to see if Susan Buck-Morss had anything to say about pseudo-activity in her The Origin of Negative Dialectics. I didn’t find anything on...

Is The Downward Sloping Phillips Curve Back?  Maybe. We have gotten so used to the idea that to the extent it is even meaningful it is flat at an inflation rate of 2%, nobody talks about the old textbook Phillips Curve that slopes down.  But there is some evidence that out of all these pandemic upheavals it may be back, at least for a while. If this is the case then indeed there may be a tradeoff, and the higher inflation the US is experiencing...

Before paper, journalists drew on the walls of caves, trees, rocks, in the dirt and sand, … About 3,000 BCE, they were given papyrus by Egyptians. Then they learned how to write, leaving the art to others. The ink, with which to, followed around 2,600 BCE. On parchment around 300 BCE, paper since about 200 BCE. Printing on paper evolved in several locations between 1040 and 1440 CE. For more than 600 years, journalism was associated with writing and...

RJS Reports: Producer Prices Rose 0.2% in December; Record 6.9% Annual Increase in Core PPI; Record 7.9% YoY Increase for Final Demand Services The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 0.2% in December, as average prices for finished wholesale goods fell 0.4%, while margins of final services providers were 0.5% higher . . . that increase followed a revised 1.0% increase in November, when prices for finished...

Weekly Indicators for January 10 – 14 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. In addition to Omicron, commodity prices and interest rates are having an impact across the board on the long and short term forecasts and the nowcast. (Just for spite, two weeks ago some RW nut jobs had a fit about my including a meteor as the image for the article, so this week I including an even more graphic...

December real retail sales tank; industrial production also declines; consumer slowdown seems nearly certain   – by New Deal democrat Two days ago, in connection with consumer inflation, I reiterated that: “we certainly are at a point where a sharp deceleration beginning with the consumer sector of the economy is more likely than not.” I didn’t expect to have it show up so soon! Retail sales, one of my favorite “real” economic indicators,...

Continuing unemployment claims make new 45+ year low – by New Deal democrat New claims increased 23,000 last week to 230,000. The 4 week average of new claims increased 6,250 to 210,750: The big increase is likely affected by seasonality. It’ll be another week or two before we can tell if there is any real change in trend. If there is, it is likely to be a flattening in new claims rather than any significant increase.  Continuing claims...

Commenter and Blogger RJS, Focus on Fracking, Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a new 19 year low; commercial crude inventories fall to 45 month low, total oil supplies lowest since January 20th 2012; implied gasoline demand at 11 month low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending January 7th indicated that despite a big drop in our oil exports, a...