The Angry Bear

Why is the 2% inflation target sacred ? A very strong case can be made that a higher target would be better, because it would mean normal nominal interest rates are further from the (near) zero lower bound. DeLong and Summers made this point in the 90s . AEA President and former IMF head economist OJ Blanchard made it in 2010. Yet it gets nowhere. The 2% target is the gold standard of the 21st century. There is no historical or theoretical basis for...

Under Trump the federal deficit has rebounded to some 4.4 % of GDP  — it is the same whether you look at it quarterly or monthly data as this chart does.  The monthly estimate is calculated by Haver Analytics. So much for the tax cut paying for itself. The shaded areas are by Presidential term, not of recessions as is usually the case.  Typically, Republicans leave office with a larger deficit than they inherited while Democrats leave with a smaller one,...

Housing has bottomed With the release of new home sales this morning, and existing home sales yesterday, it is increasingly apparent that housing has bottomed – just as I said a number of months ago that it would sometime this spring. To the graphs! New home sales (blue in the graph below) bottomed last October, at 557,000 units annualized. As of June, they were at 646,000: This isn’t as good as earlier this spring, but is better than every other...

Repeat Message to the Mainstream Media: Stop Serving as Trump’s Propaganda Machine I don’t usually like to repeat myself in these posts, but when it comes to the media getting suckered by Trump and serving as bots in his reelection campaign, I have to get shrill: no more headlines reporting on Trump’s tweets, taunts and tantrums!  Just stop!  Now! The New York Times is one of the worst, and they would do well to read their own reportage on the matter. ...

Donald Trump addressed a rightwing crowd (Turning Point USA) in Washington on Tuesday. The audience roared in support of the president standing in front of the Presidential Seal. Now take a close look at the seal. It had been doctored to include a two-headed eagle – the same as the Russian seal and in place of arrows in one of the eagle’ talons – there was golf clubs. Click on the image for better detail. ...

by New Deal democrat My forecast for the rest of 2019 is . . . . . . . up at Seeking Alpha! I’ll be doing my long term forecast through mid year 2020 once Q2 GDP comes out on Friday. It’ll probably get posted sometime next week. P.S. Sorry for the lack of posting yesterday. I submitted the above to SA on Sunday, but they didn’t get around to putting it up until late yesterday afternoon.  If I have the energy, I’ll put up an extra post maybe this...

https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1154042744702029824?s=20 Also the MSM noticed. Bump is a Washington Post reporter. The point is that this implies that Mueller thinks Trump was guilty and that he would have a reasonable chance of convincing a jury that there is proof beyond reasonable doubt of Trump’s guilt. The other answer was “that was a sufficient reason to not indict Trump which doesn’t imply that it was a necessary condition. As written in the...

Everyone is waiting for tomorrow to see what Mueller will tell the House. I am going to say it will be nothing other than what has already been said verbally. No one is going to read the text version and see what was really said by Mueller. Only a few of us will and I have yet to find a place to place it in my bathroom. In Michigan in May, Congressional Representative Justin Amash had a townhall in his district to explain why he called for the...

We use large-scale federal survey data linked to administrative death records to investigate the relationship between Medicaid enrollment and mortality. Our analysis compares changes in mortality for near-elderly adults in states with and without Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions. We identify adults most likely to benefit using survey information on socioeconomic and citizenship status, and public program participation. We find a 0.13 percentage...