The Angry Bear

By Steve Roth (reposted from Evonomics) The Real Reason Stock Buybacks Are a Problem  Buybacks are a massive tax dodge for shareholders Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer’s New York Times op-ed, “Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks,” has thrown internet gasoline on the buyback debate. The left is waving the flag, and the right is trying to tear it down. The core Sanders/Schumer argument: buybacks extract money from firms, money that could be used to pay workers...

Leading scenes from the February jobs report Let me catch up with some details from last Friday’s employment report. As a preliminary matter, the overwhelming take was that the poor +20,000 gain was “nothing to see here, just an outlier.” The problem with that take is that, for all of 2018, the average monthly gain in jobs was just over +200,000 a month. January came in more than 100,000 above that, at +311,000 jobs, and yet I don’t recall anyone taking...

The Lordstown Effect Late last week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) announced that he will not run for president in 2020, declaring that he would prefer to stay in the Senate to criticize President Trump and support whomever the Dems nominate against Trump. He had been highly praised by various commentators, including Chris Matthews, and even conservative columnist, George Will, who wrote an entire column in WaPo praising him. In repeated polling among...

by New Deal democrat More evidence for a Q4 “Recession Watch” About a month ago, based on those Q4 2018 reports that had not been delayed by the government shutdown, plus workarounds for those that were missing, I went of “Recession Watch” for Q4 of this year. Now all of the missing pieces have been reported, and they add to the evidence justifying the call. This post is up at Seeking Alpha. My base case remains slowdown vs. recession. But I see a...

Real wage growth continued to improve in February    Now that we have February’s CPI (up +0.2%), let’s update nominal and real wage growth. First, here is a graph of nominal wage growth YoY vs. consumer inflation YoY since the beginning of this expansion almost 10 years ago: First of all, why do I bother with nominal wages? Because employers don’t give out inflation-adjusted salary and wage increases. If they give you a 3% raise, it’s a 3% raise...

Is Russia Becoming A Neo-Socialist NEP Economy? Probbly not, but there has been some movement in that direction.  The New Economic Policy  (NEP) was the Socviet system in the 1920s after the WarCommunism period and before Stalin imposed command central planning as well ass full state ownership of the means of production, classsic socialism.  The War Communism period was a command economy, but without central planning.  Famine appeared as authorities...

Brad DeLong got a huge amount of attention by saying it was time for neoliberals such as Brad DeLong to pass the baton to those to their left. Alarmingly, he seems to have written this first on twitter. Zach Beuchamp rescued it from tawdry twitter to now very respectable blogosphere with an interview. One interesting aspect is that Brad has very little criticism of 90s era Brad’s policy proposals. Basically, the argument is that Democrats must stick...

Negative Nov. and Dec. revisions overwhelm positive January retail sales The initial spin on this morning’s delayed retail sales report for January has been positive, with for example the Wall Street Journal calling it a “rebound” and “a sign of solid economic momentum in the first quarter. Ummmmm, No. Both nominally and in real terms, retails sales did improve by +0.2% in January over December. The problem is, both November and December were revised...

Via Brad Delong comes two pedictions FROM 2008/09 from our current economist in the White House here. Larry Kudlow (December 7, 2007): Bush Boom Continues: “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong. It’s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we are looking at Goldilocks 2.0. (And that’s a minimum). Goldilocks is alive and well. The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it’s still...