The Angry Bear

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) by Robert Waldmann I get Ruthless With David Leonard David Leonard picks cherries in a generally good op-ed. I agree entirely with his general conclusion that Democrats should run a populist campaign (no triangulation — he should have noted that Clinton ran on raising taxes on the rich and cutting taxes on the middle class in 1992 — he was a populist before he was a triangulator). He also says don’t...

There seems to be some confusion about the impact of Census employment of temporary and intermittent employment for the 2020 Census. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has a table showing the monthly  employment for Special Census workers. You can find it at: BLS – Special Census Workers The table also has the data from the 1990 and 2000 Census so you can compare what happened in those Censuses to what to expect over the next year. I took the data from...

“Cigna gets major boost from Express Scripts in Q2,” Robert King, FierceHealthcare, August 1, 2019 And some claim PBMs do not matter in the cost of healthcare? Cigna healthcare insurance generated ~ $38 billion in revenue the second quarter 2019 and a major increase due mostly to a merger with pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) Express Scripts. According to company financial results released Thursday, Cigna’s pharmacy services business generated $23.5...

(Dan here….some sharp humor for Sunday) I made something in honor of #sharpiegate. Enjoy. pic.twitter.com/vTm6KPaFAt — Sam Spiegel ? (@UNSEATpac) September 5, 2019

Trump: When Reality TV Becomes Reality The New York Times has an excellent dissection today of the Trump presidency as a reality TV show that has managed to set up shop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, written by its chief TV critic, James Poniewozik.  His op-ed digs down into the props and story line of “The Apprentice” and how its tone evolved over its 14-year lifespan.  He places it nicely within the ecosystem of post-Survivor entertainment and the...

For seven years from 2012 to 2018 the monthly payroll employment showed a solid trend of around 200,000 gains each and every month.  If it was much above or below this trend, analysts found some excuse to explain the difference and expected the off-trend observation to be quickly reversed.  So far this year most analysts continued to act as if this pattern was being repeated. However, in August the Bureau of labor Statistics (BLS) rebenchmarked the data...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for September 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The nowcast and the long term forecast have been pretty stable, but the short term forecast has been volatile recently – and the monthly series (slightly negative) vs. the weekly data (more positive) are not in sync. This is likely because there is much more monthly data (usually from the government) than weekly data (more often...

Is Doing Environmental Economics Especially Depressing? We have now learned that on Aug. 27 last week Matin Weitzman hanged himself, leaving a note citing his failure to share in last year’s Nobel Prize as well as his apparently declining mental acuity.  That prize he did not share included William Nordhaus as a recipient for his work on climate economics issues, a topic that Weitzman also worked on, arguably more deeply and originally than did...

August jobs report: for once, the underwhelming headline masked very good internals HEADLINES: +130,000 jobs added (+105,000 ex-Census) U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.2% to 7.2% Leading employment indicators of a slowdown or recession   I am highlighting these because many leading indicators overall strongly suggest that an employment slowdown is coming. The following more leading numbers in the report tell us about...