The Angry Bear

Sanctions On Iran Are Hitting Hezbollah That is the top headline, upper right corner front page, of today’s Washington Post, a quite long article by Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamous.  WaPo has been much criticized by Trump and his supporters for alleged “fake news” critical of his leaving the Iran nuclear deal while Iran was compliant and not only reimposing the sanctions put on by Obama to get Iran to the negotiating table for that deal, but adding more and...

Dan here…the United States Library of Congress will be archiving and collecting material from Angry Bear. The overall digital archiving project began in ernest since 2013.   Abbie Grotke,  Lead Librarian Web Archiving Team, affirmed the process.  Below are excerpts from the letter of request and the Library website. The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to...

TDS vs ODS vs BDS This is motivated by running on in the econoblogosphere to Trump supporters who when confronted with hard facts they cannot refute revert to name calling that those stating actual facts are suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS).  I have recently seen it thrown out “liberally.”  What is going on here? The beginning of this odd label dates to the George W. Bush era, specifically 2003 when the late Charles Krauthammer, a...

by Dale Coberly KOTLICOFF ON THE HILL with Social Security Larry Kotlikoff wrote an editorial that appeared May 14 in “The Hill:”  https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/443465-social-security-just-ran-a-9-trillion-deficit-and-nobody-noticed He cried, “Wolf! Wolf! Social Security ran a 9 Trillion Dollar Deficit last year and nobody noticed!” He went on to explain this was the increase in the “infinite horizon Present Value of the Unfunded Deficit” from...

Consumer credit: both producer and consumer sides of the ledger show mortgage market OK, increasing stress for other loans The New York Fed reported on household debt and credit. The good news is that there has been no increase in total delinquencies: This is important because the amount of delinquencies would be expected to increase if we were close to getting into a recession. The somewhat more bad news is that, if the *amount* of delinquencies has...

Justice Stevens Shoots At Gun Decision Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, now 99 years old, has written a book, The Making of a Justice: My First 94 Years. Apparently he considers the  District of Columbia versus Heller decision to be the worst of all those that was made during his time on the Supreme Court, that one on  a 5-4 vote.  That decision upended the interpretations of the Second Amendment that had been in place since the amendment...

by Joseph Joyce The Exorbitant Privilege in a World of Low Interest Rates The U.S. dollar has long enjoyed what French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called an “exorbitant privilege.”  The U.S. can finance its current account deficits and acquisition of foreign assets by issuing Treasury securities that are held by foreign central banks as reserves. The dollar’s share of foreign reserves, while falling, remains over 60%.  But in a world of low...

Who Needs Critical Thinking? Apparently not the US military. “Critical thinking” has long been a buzz phrase of US higher education.  There was a time when I could not hear a speech by a higher administrative person at my or other higher ed institutions that did not tout critical thinking as a really important goal of higher ed.  We were all supposed to be teaching it all the time.  I got a bit tired of these incessant speeches, but in fact I agreed with...

We are probably close (~500,000) to “full employment” From time to time over the past few years I have tried to estimate how far we were from “full employment,” by which I meant the average levels of the best year in each of the past two expansions. I also estimated how long it would take to get there given the then-current monthly gains in employment. For example, two years ago I estimated that we needed to add another 2.5 million people, or 1.5% of the...