The Angry Bear

Empire State Manufacturing: OUCH! I’m on vacation this week, so fair warning that there is probably going to be light posting! The only economic news of note today was the Empire State Manufacturing Index.  Only one district, only one survey, in a noisy series, but just the same, the overall index fell to -8.6 and the new orders component fell to -12: This brings the average of all five regional Fed Indexes down to +1. If the Philly Index simply declines...

I’ve been on the beat of income inequality since I started blogging here.  My theory: We changed the way we make money from one of making it from producing (polishing rocks into tools) to one of making money from money.  When you can make money from moving money, you don’t need to compete.  Just buy back your stock, just collect rents, just get your tax cuts. The World Bank has a new report out on Inequality 2018.   I want to direct you to a chart that...

Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher. Here’s this week’s update. Initial claims last week were 222,000. The four week moving average was 217,750. First, the four week average is...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 10 – 14 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The divergence between the near term vs. longer term forecast is increasing, and the risk that the forecast is too optimistic is asymmetrical, because for the economy, Trump’s chaotic tariff behavior cannot improve the situation, but can definitely cause harm.

Learning The Origin Of “Duality”  Yesterday I learned that the person who first used the term “duality” in connection with linear programming, indeed with anything in economics, was John von Neumann in a private conversation with George Dantzig in 1947, the “father of linear programming.”  That was the year Dantzig published his paper showing the simplex method for solving linear programming problems, bot their primals and their  duals.  Von Neumann wrote...

Robert J. Samuelson Goes Whole Hog Against Dems On Social Programs I want to follow Dean Baker in dumping on the Robert J. Samuelson Monday, 9/11/19 WaPo column on “The Democrats’ fairy-tale campaigns.”  He may be right that lots of proposals have been put forward with no clear accounting of how much all of them will cost, but RJS also fails to recognize some might save money, such as a properly structured universal health care program that might move...

Kevin Drum wrote a typically brilliant post on absurdly high estimates of the growth of the number of health care administrators. I was very interested in one little passage. My comment. Dear Kevin You used to work for a tech company and IIRC in public relations. Now your day job is as a blogger-journalist. Don’t quit your day job. you wrote “Once you take into account the growth in health care generally, the share devoted to administration has gone up...

People have long struggled to understand The Word of God. One might even wonder if a better approach would be to rely on artificial intelligence. However, I’m not sure AI algorithms understand Him either This shows that even God the Omnipotent can’t manage sarcasm blatant enough for Twitter. Twitter has repented, but it looks like a very long penance to me. I fear not His wrath, for though I walk in the valley of copyright infringment fair use is...

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit. Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon  on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the...