The Angry Bear

If you want to understand why Mark Thoma’s 12-year daily-and-then-some blogging effort has become intermittent, consider that President Shit-for-Brains has made his nomination for the person to ru(i)n the World Bank. David Malpass. This David Malpass. The best part of the nomination so far? This Twitter feed from Charles Kenny. Brad DeLong concurs. And I’m not the only one bringing back my writings from almost a decade ago. David Glasner at Uneasy Money...

The End Of The End Of The Cold War It is a sign of how wacko things hve gotten that the truly most important event of the past week has simply beeen buried in the news by all the juffing and puffing over Trump’s shutdown ending and these reveleations about VA Governor Northam.  This would be decidion by the US on Feb. 1 to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) treaty with Russia, followed by Russia’s doing so as well shortly thereafter. ...

Reduction in Representation as the remedy for voter suppression This is the second take prompted by my reading of David W. Blight‘s biography of Frederick Douglass. In the “nothing is every really new” department, voter suppression was very much on the mind of Douglass and other radical Republicans during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Douglass was fond of saying that blacks would only gain equality once they exercised power through three...

Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the Copperhead GOP I am currently reading David W. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, the 19th century orator and champion of black equality. Today I wanted to briefly write on several timely topics inspired by that tome. Douglass was biracial, or in the parlance of the day, a mulatto. His mother was a young slave named Harriet Bailey. His father was probably Aaron Anthony, the “overseer of overseers” of...

January jobs report: a tale of two almost diametrically opposed components HEADLINES: +304,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate rose 0.1% from 3.9% to 4.0% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.5% from 7.6% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: declined -73,000 from 5.327 million to 5.254 million Part time for economic reasons: rose +490,000 from...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 28 – February 1 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.There are continuing if small shifts in all of the long leading, short leading, and coincident timeframes.

I Support Virginia Governor, Ralph Northam Current media is denouncing VA Gov Ralph Northam with many demanding he resign now over an unfortunate incident in his youth. I note that that the final crucial person who gave us Obamacare was the late Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. He was in his youth a member of the Klu Klux Klan, indeed held some office in it. In the end when the ultimate votes in the Senate came, which had Republicans denouncing him over...

Advance reading of January manufacturing supports further slowdown I have been using an average of the five regional Fed new orders indexes to forecast the direction of the ISM manufacturing new orders index, and indirectly manufacturing production.  Now that all five regional Fed indexes have been reported, here’s a comparison of the regional Fed averages (left) and ISM new orders (right) for all of 2018 plus this month: 2018 JAN   15   65.4 FEB   20...

There is quite a bit of Medicare fraud occurring in the nation and there has been a coordinated attack on it. The fraud can be measured in the $billions. Commercial healthcare Insurance fraud is also a problem and insurance companies spend quite a bit of money fighting it which adds to their administrative fees of 15 and 20%. 99.9% of the time the theft goes into the pocket of the thieves. People get rich off of this stuff. In Madison County Indiana, a...