The Angry Bear

Setting markers for a 2019 slowdown in the jobs market How might a slowdown (not a recession, but a decline in growth to the 1%-2% YoY range in GDP) that I’ve been forecasting for around midyear 2019 manifest itself in the employment arena? One of my mantras is that “hiring leads firing.” In other words, companies slow or stop their hiring plans, or cut back on hours, before they actually start laying people off. So, one natural place to look is the...

Final thoughts on the 2018 midterms Here are six takeaways from last night’s results: 1. It *was* a wave election in the popular vote, but it was blunted by gerrymandering: Here’s a tweet by Sam Wang: Even though Democrats won the popular vote by 9.2%, they only eked out 12 seats over a majority, and came about 4 seats short of Nate Silver’s median projection: By contrast, in 2010, a smaller vote advantage led to a 63 seat gain for the GOP....

Trump’s final pre-midterm job approval As promised, following up on yesterday’s post, here is Gallup’s final Trump job approval rating, as of the last weekend before Election Day: At very least, it sure looks like his fear-mongering about immigrants hasn’t helped, and it may have backfired. I will blog on the election results tomorrow night. Regular economist blogging should resume Wednesday. ...

(Dan here…better a bit late than ….) by Barkley Rosser Monday Before The Midterms And WaPo Is At It Again It is Robert J. Samuelson doing his usual schtick, albeit with some recognition of other issues, such as global warming and immigration.  But these are not what has his prime attention on the day before midterm elections in the US.  Moaning that “Everyone” will lose this election, his main focus is on the budget deficit, without a single mention of...

A message with beauty. Listen to Mama Cass and John Denver talk about the need to register and vote in  August of 1972.  Gee, what was happening then? Maybe this vote will be the one that sets us on a path to not repeat history. Maybe. Enjoy the song.[embedded content]

From an interview on NPR’s Here and Now comes: “The official actuaries of the Social Security system say in order to get our Social Security and retirement funds in balance, they’d have to cut benefits by 25 percent indefinitely into the future,” he says. “Do I think it’s going to happen? Well I don’t know, but this is one of the reasons why inflation is the major problem out there. So long as you don’t do it, you’re going to cause the debt overall — the...

As predicted, a deeply unpopular Trump stomped on the GOP message; early races I’ll be watching Tuesday night As I wrote a few weeks ago, whatever message Congressional GOPers might have wanted to put out (like, “our tax cuts helped spur the best economy in years!”) got stomped on by Donald Trump. As it turns out, (please be sitting down for this) he was being truthful when he talked about momentum having been going his way. Here’s Gallup’s weekly...

by Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Economists Agree: Democratic Presidents are Better at Making Us Rich. Eight Reasons Why. In 2013, economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson — no wild-eyed liberals, they — asked a very important question: Why has the U.S. economy performed better under Democratic than Republican presidents, “almost regardless of how one measures performance”? Start with their “performed better” assertion: it’s uncontestable....

October jobs report: probably the best report of the entire expansion HEADLINES: +250,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.7% U6 underemployment rate declined -0.1% from 7.5% to 7.4% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  rose +72,000 from 5.237 million to 5.309 million Part time for economic reasons: fell -21,000 from 4.642 million...