The Angry Bear

How economists blew the analysis of the manufacturing jobs shock I came across this article yesterday, posted by – to his credit – Brad DeLong, whose argument it eviscerates. Entitled “The Epic MIstake about Manufacturing That’s Cost Americans Millions of Jobs,” it deserves widespread attention. So I am summarizing it here. But by all means go and read the entire piece. Just to give you the frame of reference, here is the historical graph of...

(Dan here…see previous posts VSPS get their budget deal    2015 Econospeak and Gas all boomers or at least tax and cut    2015 Econospeak  Also see Millenials and baby boomers) “ok boomer ” or “gas all boomers” Within the last week or so there seems to have been an explosion of yattering over “ok boomer.” Over the last few years in various parts of the internet there was a self-righteous meme pushing “gas all boomers.”  Yeah. This never made it to the...

Scenes from the October employment report: leading sectors remain poor Yesterday I discussed unemployment and labor force participation from last week’s jobs report, which with the significant exception that better wage growth would probably lead to more people deciding that they’d like a job, remains very positive. Today let’s look at the bad news, which is the same as last month’s: leading indicators for employment are weak to negative. To begin with,...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha  My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The biggest story of the week was the move higher in long term interest rates. This means that the “yield curve inversion” you’ve read so much about in the past year is over. At the same time, long term interest rates (e.g., for mortgages) haven’t moved back high enough to pose a danger to the housing market. In other words,...

David Zetland….”For years, I have complained that “nobody wakes up in the morning, looks at GDP statistics, and changes their plans for the day.” Listen to this podcast on mis-measuring productivity and manufacturing statistics, which may have given populists excuses to “fix” problems that never existed. (My impression is that many more people would be happier if they looked at their quality of life instead of a [random? inaccurate?] reference point that...

Mankiw’s Ideal Democrat (Bloomberg Alert) Greg Mankiw has always been a Never Trumper: I just came back from city hall, where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent). Two reasons: First, the Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump’s misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during...

Scenes from the October employment report: full employment? Last Friday the household jobs report – the one that tells us about unemployment, underemployment, and labor force participation – has been particularly strong in the past three months. This has driven some impressive gains in labor force participation and the unemployment rate. To begin with, gains in employment as measured by the household survey (red in the graphs below), as opposed to the...

With the presidential election still a year away, Wall Street is starting its normal analysis that if a democrat is elected it will cause a devastating stock market crash.  One would think that after all these years of such claims being proven dead wrong that the street would finally give up on it. In the post WWII era from Truman to Obama it is 70 years and each party has had bad candidates in office for half that time.  Truman was only President for...

by Joseph Joyce The Changing Nature of FDI The OECD has published its data on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) for the first half of 2019. They reveal how multinational firms are responding to the slowdown in global trade and the U.S.-Chinese tariffs. They may also reflect longer-term trends in FDI as multinationals reconfigure the scope of their activities. Overall global FDI flows fell by 20% in the first half of the year as compared to the...