The Angry Bear

At This Point Richard Nixon Resigned Richard Nixon resigned as president after the House Judiciary Committee recommended he  be impeached, the vote that just happened yesterday for President Trump.  In the case of Nixon that vote was followed by a famous visit from three powerful GOP senators, including Barry Goldwater, who informed Nixon that he had lost the support of the GOP in the Senate.  Of course now we have the GOP Senate Majority Leader...

Here is the abstract of a new paper by Edward Wolff: The paper analyzes the fiscal effects of a Swiss-type tax on household wealth, with a $120,000 exemption and marginal tax rates running from 0.05 to 0.3 percent on $2,400,000 or more of wealth. It also considers a wealth tax proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren with a $50,000,000 exemption, a two percent tax on wealth above that and a one percent surcharge on wealth above $1,000,000,000. Based on the...

November real retail sales show consumption still weakly positive Retail sales are one of my favorite indicators, because in real terms they can tell us so much about the present, near term forecast, and longer term forecast for the economy. This morning retail sales for November were reported up +0.2%, while October was also revised up +0.1%. Since consumer inflation increased by +0.3%, however, real retail sales were down less than -0.1%. Real retails...

In October the real trade deficit fell to $79,133 (million 2012 $) from the third quarter average of $84,713 (million 2012 $), a 6.6% improvement. This implies that the fourth quarter is starting with trade making a significant large boost to fourth quarter real GDP growth. Remember, the trade balance is the difference between two very large numbers so a small change in either exports or imports can generate a large change in the balance.  The year over...

Off topic: two solutions to home delivery theft By now we all know that theft of packages delivered to people’s home doorstep is a big problem. Here are pictures of two solutions:1. Massive 1984-style and easily hackable home monitoring. Or even worse, the ability of the delivery person to open the homeonwer’s garage to leave the package inside. 2. A large 1950’s style milkbox: For those of you who may not know what I am talking about, the milkbox...

Is The Trump Trade War Over? Probably not, but maybe. The basic problem is that Trump has long wanted to beat up on other nations in a trade war; but now he is getting impeached, he needs positive news, and the stock markets like words of his making trade deals. So we get his trade deals, but it is all sort of a mess. So there are two matters here. One involves China, discussed in a new post here by pgl, which I shall comment on later. But my quick take...

Exaggerated Benefits for U.S. Farmers from the China Trade News How gullible is Reuters? China will likely hit $50 billion in purchases of U.S. agricultural products, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday after earlier announcing that he would roll back scheduled tariffs on Chinese imports as Washington and Beijing finalized an initial trade deal. That was their opening paragraph. Fortune had a different take: The Markets Have Spoken: Phase One...

Stealing The 2016 Election? (Dan here…Thursday)  I have been watching the later stages of the still-ongoing House  Judiciary Comm hearing on impeaching Trump.  I have seen Republicans repeatedly ranting on about how this is an effort to undo the “popular election” of Trump, the will of the “63 million” who voted for Trump. Really, how dumb are these people? Hillary had three million more than Trump, 66 million.  He was not the popular winner.  What a...

November average real wage growth stable, but aggregate growth now puts expansion in second place behind 1990s November consumer inflation came in at +0.3%. Since in last Friday’s jobs report average hourly earnings also increased +0.3%, real average hourly earnings were unchanged: In a longer term perspective, this means that real wages remain at 97.9% of their all time high in January 1973: Since in November 2018 consumer inflation came in a 0%,...