The Angry Bear

This is the same stuff/sh*t, I am seeing in Michigan. I wish I could give them one week of Covid so they could learn. The following is from Digby at Hullabaloo: I just watched another 60 something mask-less Republican woman in Arizona standing in a crowd of others just like herself tell the news media that she thinks the Coronavirus is not worse than a cold or the flu and she has no fear of it. (She also weirdly said that they don’t even have a name for...

In response to the comment on my last post . . . rolling 7 day average death rates with the peak for each country set to 100. We peaked later than most countries other than Germany, which seems to be making better progress than us.  We may be doing as well (or as badly) as the U.K.  It seems like France and Spain are also outperforming the U.S. on this metric.

We seem to be doing comparatively poorly at getting the COVID-19 epidemic under control: Is this a useful metric for measuring progress?  To what extent does this reflect policy choices?

(Dan here…NDd’s post points to more than the impact of the US catching up in testing only recently, but also points to beginning answers readers have asked in comments about what the statistics show regarding re-opening and where we might be failing to report. ) Coronavirus dashboard: emphasis on testing I want to focus this edition on testing issues. While the seven day average number of deaths continues to decline: The seven day average number of...

RIP Oliver Williamson Oliver Williamson died yesterday at age 87, I do not know of what. He was famous as the main developer of New Institutional Economics, following the influence of Ronald Coase, which emphasizes the role of transactions costs in the formation and development of economic (and some other) institutions.  He received the Nobel Prize in 2009, along with Elinor Ostrom, but his influence was really quite vast for a man from a working class...

Bad news and good news on coronavirus; plus, implications for Election Day No economic news today as we head into the Memorial Day weekend, but there are a few coronavirus and economic/political developments of note. First, the bad news: the declining trend in new diagnosed cases of coronavirus in the US has stopped in the past week. Instead new cases have leveled off. Here’s a graph from Conor Kelly’s excellent tableau coronavirus dashboard page:...

As noted in my last post, I have been looking at data. This usually causes trouble, and today is no exception. As anyone who was paying attention predicted, the “Easter Effect”–a large gathering of people (“EC” or Otherwise) in an enclosed area that likely has multiple asymptomatic carriers (and likely a few with symptoms) is a recipe for infection. With a two- to three-week gestation period, that there was going to be an increase in cases at the end of...

How Large is the Income Shifting Problem? I took up this invitation from Dan Shaviro: tomorrow morning I’ll be participating in a very interesting international tax policy conference with a number of outstanding participants. It’s on Zoom … I’m actually the second speaker on Panel II (although we’re listed above alphabetically), so I will be speaking from roughly 11:08 to 11:15. I’m planning to discuss the OECD’s Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 initiatives,...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Many of the indicators are bouncing off their worst levels, especially those like mortgages that are affected by lower interest rates. On the other hand, employment losses continue to spread out. As usual, clicking over and reading not only should be educational for you, but rewards me a little bit for my efforts....

Initial jobless claims: employment damage continues to spread Now that there is more than one month of data from initial and continuing jobless claims since the coronavirus lockdowns started, we can begin to trace whether the economic impacts of the virus are being contained, or are continuing to spread out into further damage. Nine weeks in, it appears that, insofar as employment is concerned, the damage is continuing to spread. First, let’s look at...