The Angry Bear

Just revealed: The opioid/OxyContin maker Purdue and members of the billionaire Sackler family owning the company have offered to settle thousands of lawsuits against the company for $10 to $12 billion. according to people briefed on the offer. More than 2,000 states, cities, and counties across America are pursuing the OxyContin maker over the large bills for cleaning up the opioid crisis — and are deciding whether to accept the offer by Friday. The...

“The court found that Johnson & Johnson’s actions had created a “public nuisance,” which Oklahoma law defines to mean an act (or failure to act) that ‘annoys, injures or endangers’ the health and safety of an ‘entire community.’ In a 42-page opinion, Oklahoma State Judge Thad Balkman details how Johnson & Johnson’s sales and marketing assured doctors the appearance of addiction in patients due to the use of J & J opioid products was actually...

(Dan here…better late than not) by New Deal democrat An extended look at jobless claims, and a note about payrolls Let’s take an extended look at jobless claims, with a side note about payrolls. First, I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are:1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher.Here’s...

End of month July and Pfizer is spinning off Upjohn to generic drug/device company Mylan NV. Pfizer bought 57% of the unnamed (mid – 2020) new company. This move comes under Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla who took over the reins from Ian Read in January, 2019. Bourla has been with Pfizer for 25 years. Before becoming the CEO, Bourla was the Chief Operating Officer (COO) overseeing the company’s commercial strategy, manufacturing, and global product development...

On Appeasement Sometimes on Sundays I leave the dreary world of economics behind and write of broader things. Since most tomes covering American history have an underlying sunny optimism that is nowhere appropriate for our times, recently I’ve been reading more world history having to do with the rise of fascism or fall of democracy. Several of those books have been disappointing: they are thorough blow by blow descriptions, without organizing the...

Digital Sales Tax v. Tariffs on French Wine Even before Donald Trump departed for the G7 in Biarritz France, he threatened another trade war this time with the host country over the digital sales tax: U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday reiterated criticism of a French proposal to levy a tax aimed at big U.S. technology companies and threatened again to retaliate by taxing French wine. Speaking to reporters at the White House before leaving for a...

In his newly published Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care, Giorgos Kallis challenges what has become the conventional perversion of Robert Malthus’s economic argument. Far from being a “prophet of doom” predicting the inevitable overshoot by population growth of food supplies, Malthus was an advocate of industrial progress as the antidote to a providential discrepancy between the tendency of humans to reproduce and the...

Not doomed yet v.2.0: beware recession porn Way back when I first started writing online almost 15 years ago, my very first post on Daily Kos was a little note called “Not Doomed Yet.”  It was pretty pathetic compared with the standards of my writing since the Great Recession, but the point of it was, back in 2005, that the conditions necessary for an economic downturn hadn’t quite happened yet. Needless to say, it went nowhere. To the contrary, my big...