The Angry Bear

I really enjoy Rick Wilson’s thoughts on the Republican Party, his former party until 3 years ago. I don’t know which part of his latest Washington Post Op-ed I like most but here goes As the saying goes, you had one job, Republicans. Now? Your job really isn’t representing your districts. It’s backfilling and wallpapering over your president’s latest excesses, outrages, racial arson and verbal Twitter dysentery. Every day is a new crisis, and every day...

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 Change in the U.S. Direct Investment Position The U.S. has long held an external balance sheet that is comprised of foreign equity assets, mainly in the form of direct investment (DI), and...

Monetary policy is roughly the only issue on which I regularly disagree with Matt Yglesias. So it is boring to note that I agree with almost everything he wrote in his Vox article on the recently announced 0.25% Federal Funds target rate cut. His main assertions are: – it is a very reasonable move even though Trump advocated it and it will help Trump’s 2020 campaign. – The previous stance of normalizing interest rates because normal interest rates are...

Origin of the 2 Percent Inflation Target I have made most of these comments as comments on Econbrowser and Angry Bear (an excellent post by Robert Waldman), as well as on Econbrowser in response to a serious post by Jeffrey Frankel. I note that pgl has added useful comments on this matter in the other blogs. So it was 1990 that the New Zealand central bank became the first in the world to impose an inflation target of 0-0.002.  It worked out pretty...

Kevin Drum notes conservative hackitude. I’m just going to fair use the whole post (please click the link so I don’t feel guilty) I would like to offer a comment on the hack gap this morning: It’s remarkable the number of liberal economists who continue to favor an interest rate cut from the Fed. They are displaying intellectually honesty here: with inflation low, there’s no reason not to take out an insurance policy that could keep the current economic...

Degeneration of Bipartisan Blog Sites: Econbrowser This is probably just a whiny complaint of well-known and long running issues.  Indeed for a long time most blog sites (not to mention most twitterspheres and Instogram Idiotspheres) have been mono-partisan in those who participate in their discussions/debates. This has been true for a long time for most sites in the Econoblogosphere, including this site, which clearly tilts “left,” even though we have...

Pledging Zero Carbon Emissions by 2030 or 2050: Does it Matter? We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream legislators.  How significant is this difference?  Does where you stand on climate policy depend on whether your policy has a 2030...

Both long leading components of Q2 GDP declined UPDATED with revisions and further comments The headline number for the first estimate of real GDP in Q2 2019 was 2.1%, as I’m sure you’ve read elsewhere. As is usual, I’m not so interested in what is, after all, what the view in the rear view mirror is, as what the leading components can tell us about what lays ahead. In that regard, both leading components of GDP declined. – Real private fixed...

Dan here.  You will be reading more of him soon…David Zetland has contributed here on water issues via Aguanomics. He now publishes his blog The one-handed economist.  He is a native Californian who moved to Amsterdam several years ago. David is an assistant professor of political economy at Leiden University College, a liberal arts school located in The Hague. He teaches courses in social and business entrepreneurship, cooperation in the commons, and...