The Angry Bear

To Slow Spread Of Coronovirus, End Iran Sanctions On 3/13/20 in Foreign Policy Focus, Ariel Gold and Medea Benjamin argue that to improve the global coronavirus problem, sanctions on Iran should be lifted, quite aside from the fact they should never have been imposed in the first place as Iran was adhering to the JCPOA nuclear deal. The effect of the sanctions has been to tank the Iranian economy, including its health care sector, much worsening the...

The San Francisco Chronicle reports “shelter in place” restrictions.  My daughter lives in Santa Clara county, where schools are closed till April 13. Six Bay Area counties announced a “shelter in place” order for all residents on Monday — the strictest measure of its kind in the country — directing everyone to stay inside their homes and away from others as much as possible for the next three weeks as public health officials desperately try to curb the...

The rich, the wealthy, the privileged have to provide for themselves? What, no dog walkers, no maids, no waiters and all the other little people that make life a joy? Gardners, bus drivers, private nurses, second houses in the Hamptons, a third house in Hawaii–all cared for by the loving poor? Cutting interest rates no longer primes the pump? Neo-liberalism on its last legs? What is going to happen when climate and ecological disruption really hit? And...

Welt am Sonntag is reporting our honorable President is attempting to bribe lure a German company CureVac to develop a vaccine  to be used only in the US. Germany’s Health Ministry confirmed a report in the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”, which said President Donald Trump had offered bribes funds to lure the German company CureVac to the United States, and the German government was making counter-offers to tempt it to stay. Welt am Sonntag quoted an...

Europe’s Response to Coronavirus and the Implications for the U.S. As I listened to the morning news about the coronavirus crisis, I was reminded of this critique of the Eurozone: In a recent conference, the distinguished economist Paul Krugman repeated the oft-heard critique that the eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Waltraud Schelkle disagrees with this characterisation, and argues that no country or group of countries represents an optimal...

Benefit-Cost Analysis and the Coronavirus We are in the middle of a flurry of decision-making on how to deal with COVID-19.  After much resistance, officials are now canceling public events, closing schools and discouraging other activities that put us in contact with each other.  Travel restrictions and possible shutdowns of workplaces, as we’ve seen in Italy, may be up next. It’s interesting we haven’t heard anything about benefit-cost analysis in...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 9 – 13 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There is no clear evidence yet of a drop-off in consumer spending due to the coronavirus in the series I have been tracking, although there is evidence on the producer side. After I posted, I ran across this chart of daily reservations made at OpenTable for various metro areas: There has clearly been a big decline that began about...

Three related metrics of coronavirus Here are three different but ultimately related updates about the coronavirus pandemic. 1. It is 100x more lethal than the 2009 H1N1 swine flu The latest right-wing disinformation is that Obama waited 6 months to declare the 2009 swine flu an emergency, and 1000 people died. As others have pointed out, his Secretary of Health and Human Services did so only 11 days into the US outbreak. So why don’t we remember a big...

Coronavirus update: reason for alarm; (small) reason for hope This weekend has continued the discouraging news: reports just about everywhere that the Young Invulnerables packed the bars Friday night; the Petri dishes of airport security lines packed with Americans returning from Europe; and personally, two friends who I have known for almost 40 years getting very sick this past week and not able to be tested for coronavirus (one of whom by the way went...