The Angry Bear

The Current State of the U.S. Dairy Industry  I had to endure a discussion of the plight of American dairy farmers where Trump’s trade policies were somehow to blame. Stephanie Mercier confirmed some of the facts: According to data reported by the National Farmers Union (NFU), the average dairy farm has shown a positive net income only once in the last decade, in 2014. In 2018, the average value of production exceeded the total cost of producing each...

by Eric Kramer The Case for Carbon Taxes, Part I:  Political Subversion Economists support carbon taxes on efficiency grounds.  By putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, a carbon tax creates a strong incentive for people reduce their carbon footprint.  They can do this by switching to clean technologies or simply by reducing their use of fossil fuels – by driving less or turning down the air conditioning, for example.  Other policies can also be...

Bicycles and Wine Tariffs Jeffrey Frankel has a must read blog over at Econbrowser: The “bicycle theory” used to be a metaphor for international trade policy. Just as standing still on a bicycle is not an option — one has to keep moving forward or else the bike will fall over – so it was said that international trade negotiators must continue to engage in successive rounds of liberalization, or else the open global trading system would be pulled down by...

Live-blogging the End of the Republic The title of this piece is increasingly my feeling about the times we are living in. Almost everywhere it has been implemented, the Madisonian system has ultimately failed, ending in presidential autocracy. All of the tools are now in place for the US to fail as well. If Trump doesn’t succeed in a second term, then the Sulla or Caesar who ends our republican experiment is alive now and has learned the necessary...

A few thoughts while you are digesting Thanksgiving dinner There was a bunch of data released Wednesday, while yours truly was on the road along with everybody else. So here are a couple of thoughts for you as you sit there with your loosened belt figuring out what leftovers you’re going to be eating for the next few days . . . Initial jobless claims declined back to their recent baseline last week, so the four week average declined slightly, further...

Why Did Oil Prices Plunge This Black Friday? Nothing to do with the American super big shopping day after Thanksgiving, but several items, some of which may reverse themselves.  As it is, it was a pretty big drop, nearly 5 percent for the day for both West Texas and Brent crude, with the latter now just above $60 per barrel. The big headline is the resignation of Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul Mahdi. The immediate trigger of that was that it was...

by New Deal democrat The consumer is still alright, November 2019 edition I have a new post up at Seeking Alpha. A few months ago I took a look at the order in which I would expect the dominoes to fall if there were to be a consumer-led recession. One more domino has fallen, but several important ones are still upright. As usual, clicking over and reading puts a couple of pennies in my pocket, and should be educational for you....

I looked at this at first, wondered what it depicted, thought it might be a piece of art, and puzzled over it a bit. It is a topographical depiction (Lidar) of the Mississippi River. If you look closely, you can see roads and various plots of land in addition to the movement of the river bed over time and the various elevations. One of the key techniques used in modern cartography has its beginnings in 17th century map-making. Relief shading techniques as...

Complicating The ARAMCO IPO The Saudi ARAMCO IPO is happening on the Saudi exchange just for Saudi citizens, where apparently there is a not-so-subtle campaign on well off and connected citizens (who wish to remain that way) to buy into the IPO.  But there continues to be delays in opening it up to the rest of the world, with this partly reflecting fears of demands that might be made for more openness, and all that, with various Saudis not keen on that,...