The Angry Bear

Coronavirus dashboard for August 11: evidence that the Delta wave may be peaking in the earliest hit States My framework of analyzing the economy via leading, coincident, and lagging indicators continues to come in handy at looking at the course of the pandemic. At the beginning of June, I flagged that the number of cases had stopped declining among 5 of the least vaccinated States. By the middle of June, I wrote that Delta was going to be...

by Joseph Joyce (Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, where he holds the M. Margaret Ball Chair of International Relations. He served as the first Faculty Director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs.) China’s Outward FDI Chinese firms that want to list their stock in U.S. equity markets face a series of hurdles. The Securities and Exchange Commission is implementing a new rule that requires the firms to...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for August 9 – 13 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. For the first time, there are some significant if still minor impacts on the economy showing up due to the Delta wave. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the economy, and help me out a little bit with my lunch money. ...

I have no special insight on any foreign policy issue, but if you’re interested in a no-nonsense defense of Biden’s policy see this post by Scott Lemieux. His key points are (my interpretation/paraphrase): Long term low-engagement occupation was not a serious option, the only choices on the table were long term escalation or pulling out. (This is an important point to me. If low-engagement occupation could have worked long-term, that would...

Biden Follows Trump On Foreign Policy  We are now looking at a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan.  It looks like the Taliban will probably take control of Kabul and thus Afghanistan in the near future. Reports already show that where they control women cannot go to school and appear in public without a veil in public and much more. Many women there are unfortunately going to suffer greatly as a result of this. I am so very deeply sorry. Yes,...

George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki has filed suit against GMU over its policy of requiring students and staff to be vaccinated against covid.  Zywicki does not argue that any vaccine mandate is unconstitutional.  Instead, he claims that GMU’s vaccine mandate violates his constitutional rights to bodily integrity and medical choice because he has recovered from covid and has natural immunity.  In his view, only a mandate with an...

Scenes from the July jobs report [Note: I haven’t put up a Coronavirus dashboard in almost a week. I’ll try to get around to that later today or tomorrow. It isn’t *all* bad news.] Last Friday’s jobs report for July was probably the most uniformly positive report I have seen since I started writing about them going on 15 years ago. Let’s take a look at a few of the most salient items.First of all, unemployment (blue in the graph below) at...

Disposable forces, disposable class Thomas Chalmers undoubtedly cribbed his “disposable population” from Turgot’s classe disponible. Turgot’s meaning seems to be different from Chalmers’s. Turgot uses the term to refer to the class’s revenue coming from a surplus of produce and thus being available for use however the proprietor wishes. That is the revenue could be used for luxury consumption or it could be used for the improvement of lands,...

for Final Demand Goods, Final Demand Services, and Intermediate Services; and a 46 year High for Prices of Intermediate Goods, Commenter and Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 1.0% in July, as prices for finished wholesale goods rose 0.6% while margins of final services providers rose 1.1%…that increase followed a June report that also had the PPI 1.0% higher, but with prices for...

June JOLTS report: at last, new hires (slightly) outpace record job openings This morning’s (Aug. 9) JOLTS report for May was the best we have seen since the immediate rebound from the pandemic lockdowns.  There was yet another record level continued all of the unfilled job openings, yet another new record low in layoffs and discharges, an enhanced number of people quitting their jobs, and finally – for the first time this year – a huge number...