The Angry Bear

I found this interesting.  Mr. Giridharadas was invited to discuss his perspective regarding his themes of his book Winners take all.  He was invited by the Dutch Parliament’s Finance Committee to discuss his book.  All 6 parties showed up.  All had been given the book prior and several had read it.   This is a link to the entire 1.5 hour presentation via Youtube. One of his points that I found most interesting was at 7:13 of the discussion, during his...

Happy [insert name of preferred religious holiday here]! 3 quick hits I’ll be traveling and enjoying the holiday for a few days, so … light to non-existent posting! In the meantime, three quick hits for you: 1. New home sales – continued strength in this very forward looking sector. Even though sales declined m/m, the upward trend is pretty clear: Figure 1 2. Durable goods – flat (blue), except for Boeing (red), which is bad: Since Boeing is...

Is There An Objective Reality? Yes. So this is the ontological question: is supposed apparently “objective” reality really real? I come at this as someone who in the past questioned this.  I had my period of post-modernist questioning of objective reality. This culminated in a paper, which  I presented as a major address to receive a major recognition at my university, “Belief: Its role in economic theory and action,” American Journal of Economics and...

2019 has been a strange year. I hope for  a better 2020 with  a Happy Landing later in the year. In the spirit of Christmas; Be Safe, Enjoy Family, Be Thankful for Life, Give Freely to Others, Eat Hearty and Drink some good Beer, Wine, or Liquor of your choice, and Relax. The appropriate saying for the time? “Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas…perhaps… means a...

run75441: Catching up something we missed. NDD pointed out AB had missed a post on the 15th Amendment which happened two days before the last posted (17th) “Live Blogging  the 15th. “ Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: December 15, 1868 Sen Orrin S. Ferry (R-Conn), in the course of offering a joint resolution to lift the disabilities mandated by the 3rd Section of the Fourteenth Amendment against those who participated in the rebellion: [I]t does seem...

Does Menzie Chinn Or Tyler Cowen Replace Mark Thoma? The retirement of Mark Thoma, whose Economist’s View has been praised on his retirement with having transformed the econoblogosphere back in the mid- noughties by linking regularly, daily in his heyday, to other blogs, including this one. Thanks to him when the big crash happened, there was a wide open debate across levels and schools of thought in economics about what was going down. But for some...

Trump Brags About Record Defense Spending Niv Elis covers the latest in the Trump fiscal fiasco: President Trump on Friday signed two spending packages totaling $1.4 trillion, averting a government shutdown at midnight. The bills included all 12 annual appropriations bills for the 2020 fiscal year that started Oct. 1. They also included a slew of tax cuts, extending expiring and expired tax breaks and eliminating other taxes that amount to an additional...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 16 – 20 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is Up at Seeking Alpha. Are we just having a slowdown, or actually slipping into contraction? The short leading indicators would like to have a word. As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you up to the moment on the economy, and rewards me a little bit for my efforts.

The consumer vs. producer divergence widens at year end My economic theme for about the past half year has been the contrast between the floundering producer sector vs. the decent consumer sector. With two of the last important reports of the year out this morning, that divergence has been highlighted. First, the good news: real personal income rose +0.4% in November, and real personal spending rose +0.3%. Here’s a look at the past five years: Figure...

Political leanings through time for birth cohorts A chart on “political preferences by generation” from Pew Research has been making the rounds in the past few days. Here it is: Figure 1 This chart tells the simplistic story that older generations are more conservative than young ones. It’s considerably misleading. After all, how did the democrats ever win if older generations, who vote in higher percentages, are always more conservative than younger...