The Angry Bear

by Joseph Joyce          Joseph P. Joyce is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, where he holds the M. Margaret Ball Chair of International Relations. He served as the first Faculty Director of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs. The Coming Debt Crisis After the 2008-09 global financial crisis, economists were criticized for not predicting its coming. This charge was not totally justified, as there were some who were...

Curbside Voting Information – Wisconsin – Election Day, Tuesday, April 7 – All Absentee Ballots must be postmarked TODAY or dropped off in-person. In this order, a  decision came hours after the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned Gov. Tony Evers’s (D) executive order to postpone Tuesday’s vote, sowing confusion in a critical election featuring a Democratic presidential primary and a pivotal state Supreme Court seat. A Monday night SCOTUS decision ruled...

Given Donald Trump’s enthusiastic participation, the debate on hydroxychloroquine and Covid 19 has become very heated. As I wrote here I agree with Trump. This is unusual (not unique he and I both advocating cutting interests rates long ago before the Fed Open Market Committee cut them to 0-0.25 again). My view (and as far as I can make sense of anything he says his) is that it is wise to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for patients with Covid 19 even...

Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is predictably chaotic, vengeful, irresponsible, and impulsive.  His actions have worsened the epidemic, they have led to unnecessary deaths and to a very painful economic lockdown.  Coming in the year before he is up for re-election, this seems self-defeating:  if Trump could re-run history I have little doubt he would take aggressive action to nip the epidemic in the bud.  That said, the political strategy that...

Adding to Run’s post on rural hospital closings comes this information on rural areas and coronavirus (ABC news) Dr. Marynia Kolak is the assistant director for Health Informatics at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago, which recently released a U.S. COVID-19 Atlas, providing county-level data on COVID-19 cases to help locate emerging hotspots for the disease. The results are surprising. … “A lot of hotspots are seen in rural...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 5: mandatory lockdowns start to work by New Deal democrat Here is the update through yesterday (April 4) I’ve changed the format, moving the “just the facts, ma’am” data to the top, and comments to the end. The four most important metrics are starred (***) below. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com) Number: up +33,787 to 312,245 (vs. +32,857 on April 3) ***Rate of...

I told you so on March 2 2020 The first Covid 19 case diagnosed in New Jersey Around 3 a.m. on March 10, Balani arrived at the hospital. The medicine had come in, and she did not want to wait until the morning to administer it. With Balani in the room, a nurse woke Cai up so that he could sign the legal papers. Soon after, he was hooked up, intravenously, to the drug. The next day Cai’s fever, which he’d had for at least nine days, finally broke. Even...

One of the serious issues with healthcare today is the lack of universal availability of it across the nation. In citified areas, the availability of it mostly meets the demand of the people requiring it and is in close proximity. If you travel one to two hours outside of the city, the availability of it begins to drop off until a person in need must travel hours to get to help. The resource in more rural areas begins to drop off in a precipitous manner....

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 30 – April 3 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. This was the week when the bottom finally fell out of almost all the remaining data. Clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment on the economy, and reward me a little bit for the effort I put into this endeavor, especially now that I am devoting most of my time to the likely impacts of the coronavirus....