The Angry Bear

Economy still expanding, but with retail consumption outpacing production This morning saw two important releases of October data: industrial production and retail sales. Both showed continued strength. Industrial production is the King of Coincident Indicators, and more than any other metric typically shows whether the overall economy is expanding or contracting. In October it increased by 1.1%, while manufacturing production increased by 1.0%. The...

Democrats: the “less unpopular” party No economic news today  (Nov. 16). I hope to put up an updated Coronavirus Dashboard (hint: it’s pretty unremittingly awful) later. In the meantime, I wanted to add a postscript to yesterday’s post about the Democrats’ problem obtaining a durable electoral majority. It occurred to me after I put up yesterday’s piece is that the essence of what I wanted to say in response to the meme that “Democrats have won 7 of the...

Josh Hawley is running for president; has been since he was big enough to walk. On the night of the November 2020 election, Josh Hawley, Junior Senator from Missouri, tweeted that henceforth the republican party was the party of the working class; and the democratic party was the party of the elites. Is Senator Hawley right? Josh Hawley will be forty-one on December 31, 2020. The only Republican Presidents he’s known were Reagan, Bush, Bush and Trump. The...

Will President Biden Scrap GILTI? Congratulations to Brad Setser for being selected to be the Agency Review Team for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. I’m curious, however, as to his views on certain aspects of President Elect’s proposals with respect to corporate taxation. There were lots to criticize as to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Conservative economists were correct to note that it made corporation taxation more complicated....

The Democrats’ problem in the Senate, explained One of the memes that I have read quite a few times in the past week is that the Democrats have won 7 of the last 8 Presidential elections and that the institutions of electoral government discriminate against them. A review of the actual results of the last 8 elections does not quite support that assertion. In only 4 of those 8 elections has either party mustered a majority of voters; in the other 4 the...

Biden Won Because Of White Men?  OK, I confess I am mystified.  An article in The Guardian by Musa al-Gharbi looks at the data now available on voting patterns in the US presidential elections of 2016 compared to 2020.  Almost all groups moved towards being more pro-Trump, including both Black men and women, Hispanic men and women, Asian men and women, and white women.  The only group that moved away from Trump was white men, with his margin declining...

Via Truthout comes this thought: In 2016, the big takeaway was that 53 percent of white women voters cast their ballots in favor of Donald Trump, according to exit polls, helping cement his victory. But, in 2020, white women voters surpassed their 2016 levels of support as, according to exit polls, 55 percent of white women turned out to vote for the president… Via the New York Times exit poll reporting reflects this impression from the Edison Research...

First a story, then an introduction to Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice Org., and finally some cold hard facts from Alan about what is happening to millions of people who have student loans. Your Angry Bear blogger and activist went to a garden party in Michigan in support of Democrats and Senator Debbie Stabenow pre-2018 election. I had donated to the Democrats and directly in support of various county, state, and federal candidates. Since I had...

Lack of inflation in September consistent with weak demand; real wages increase, but will the pandemic derail the gains? Consumer prices were unchanged in October, both on a seasonally adjusted and unadjusted basis: But while the lack of inflation is good news in isolation, the last two months can also be viewed as a sign of economic weakness – lack of demand – from a recession. Digging a little deeper, for the past 40 years, recessions had...