The Angry Bear

North Korean Near-Famine Leads To Dead Nuclear Negotiators It has not been officially reported by the North Korean govt, but long running rumors are now being reported by various  serious media that Trump’s big pal Kim Jong Un has recently killed the top 5 officials of his govt who set up his  failed summit with US President Trump. According to sources I watch there has been a massive crop failure this year in the Democratic Peoples’ Republic (DPRK)....

Art Laffer is Not an Economist  Can The Hill be more wrong? President Trump will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to economist Arthur Laffer, the White House announced Friday. The president will honor Laffer on June 19 for his contributions to economic policy. The White House described Laffer as “one of the most influential economists in American history” in announcing the award. OK the Idiot-in-Chief did say...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 27 – 31 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There was a touch of weakening across several timeframes. The economy is just weak enough that continuing trade and tariff tantrums could take a slowdown and do enough damage to make it a downturn. As usual, clicking over and reading should be informative for you, and helps me just a little bit for the effort I put into the work....

Q1 corporate profits and real gross domestic income Yesterday the second estimate of Q1 GDP came out, which means that corporate profits for Q1 were finally reported. In my post earlier this week at Seeking Alpha, I wrote that corporate profits are of higher forecasting importance because of the contradiction in the signals being sent by the bond market vs. the housing market. So what light do they shed on the forecast for the next 12 months? I wrote a...

Trump’s Latest Mexican Tariff Tirade Irks Senator Grassley Senator Grassley rebukes the latest idiocy from the White House: President Trump dropped a trade war bomb on Thursday when he announced his intent to put in place new and harsh tariffs on goods from Mexico until the “illegal Immigration problem is remedied.” And among the many worried, negative reactions was one from Senate Finance Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, in a strongly worded statement....

No Fault Auto Insurance I am active in Michigan politics and many do not like me. The state’s no fault insurance has been a cost burden on many people. There is a lack of transparency in how the fees for the Personal Injury Protection portion of No Fault insurance were calculated, how fees to doctors and hospitals are set, and how much is in the PIP fund. Over the last couple of weeks Republican Senate Leader Mike Shirkey and the Republican House Leader...

It is possible to cause a huge (short term possibly reversed) increase in carbon capture by algae by dumping iron sulfate in the ocean. On the other hand, uh, well, maybe it won’t work and you will just get a few tons of fish (not many tons of carbon containing detritus on the bottom of the ocean. Now the general principal seems to be that, so long as there isn’t proof beyond reasonable doubt that a proposal will work, to stick to the tried and true and...

Does anyone know why coal production is falling out of bed?  It is down some 40% from its August level. But coal employment is still near its’ recent peak, which implies that productivity is horrible. I suspect the problem is exports to China. Maybe someone needs to ask Trump about this.

A Decision Theory Case to Chew On Here’s something I posted over on Andrew Gelman’s wonderful blog: I read Alive and thought it unknowingly made a very powerful point about decision theory, that you always have to balance the risks of action against the risks of inaction. The plane was stuck in snow on a slope that led down to a valley that was partially inhabited. Yes, the immediate survivors could not see this, and sending a party down the slope seemed...