The Angry Bear

The ICER (Institute for Clinical and Economic Review) Is an independent and non-partisan research organization. Its purpose is to evaluate the clinical and economic value of prescription drugs, medical tests, and health care and health care delivery innovations. ICER conducts rigorous analyses of all clinical data with key stakeholders to include patients, doctors, life science companies, private insurers, and the government and translate the evidence...

An Increasingly Divergent US Economy Lots of people have been huffing and puffing about whether or not the US economy will go into a recession in the near future, with Menzie Chinn and Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser saying it is now about 50-50 whether or not the US economy will go into recession by the end of 2020.   I do not have a horse in that race, but I am struck that a new odd phenomenon has recently appeared in the US economy, a split between...

Positive housing, initial claims, and Philly Fed outweigh negative industrial production So, after a nearly empty week until now, there were four economic reports this morning. Three of them were good. First, although overall housing starts and permits declined, single family permits, the most forward looking and least volatile of the metrics, were only 3000 off a new  expansion high (red in the graph below, vs. multi-family permits): Housing’s...

A Nobel for the Randomistas I don’t think anyone was surprised by this year’s “Nobel” prize in economics, which went to three American-based specialists in the design of on-the-ground experiments in low income countries, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer.  I think the award has merit, but it is important to keep in mind the severe limitations of the work being honored. The context for this year’s prize is the long, mostly frustrating...

We have had little disruption with service over the last few years, so the disruption Monday came as a surprise.  I apologize for any inconvenience.  A server malfunction was the cause.  It is a reminder that internet infrastructure has weak points other than my laptop.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for October 7 – 11 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The stars are aligning for the recovery from the present slowdown in the longer term. But in the meantime, the present and short term data is still soft. As usual, clicking over and […]

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Scenes from the September jobs report I shared the best good news from the September jobs report released last Friday: there’s a good argument that the economy has reached “full employment,” although we could do even better if real wages improved more. Today let’s look at the bad news, which comes from examining the leading […]

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Eeeeeeeeemoluments And How Bad Bruce Springsteen Is I have almost never watched through a Trump speech to one of his rallies, but I was curious what he would say at the first one after the impeachment inquiry officially started, which he held a few days ago in Minneapolis, supposedly trying to take MN away from […]