The Angry Bear

This does not come as a surprise to anyone in Michigan. Mostly it is quiet here and people are still stunned about something of this magnitude could go on for years. There were numerous complaints by female student athletes of various college ages and under which span 20 years. Complaints made to the university, administrators, coaches, trainers, etc. quietly fell to the wayside with conciliatory answers. “he is an Olympic doctor and he should know what...

Weirdly Non-Monotonic Yield Curves This is a situation that may be on the verge of disappearing and more or less normalizing, but over the last couple of months US bond markets have exhibited a weird phenomenon of non-monotonicity. It has been even weirder than what we saw during the period of negative nominal interest rates, when what we saw was interest rates on US treasury securities fell from the shortest time horizon to a low usually around the...

McDonalds Anyone, Trump Buys for Lunch? Dems Refuse over Bad Offer on the Table. Giving this guy some coverage is questionable; but he is an idiot along the lines of his boss who also says the dumbest things. KEVIN HASSETT, Trump economic adviser: “You know as soon as it’s resolved, then people get their paychecks, and the government will go back to acting normal, and the economy will go back to the 3 percent growth that President Trump’s policies have...

Not Accurate BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate. — Office of the Special Counsel. If this is the first story the special counsel has felt compelled to dispute, does that mean he had no objection to all the others that have come out before now? — Peter Baker, New York...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Rare Yglesias Google Fail (Most boring title after “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” but I couldn’t resist) Web savvy ultra wonk Matthew Yglesias wrote “There’s no polling on specific brackets or exactly who counts as rich that I can find,” Matty just google [income to be rich poll]. Jeez. Americans have varying ideas of how much money you need to earn each year to be considered “rich,” but most people...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) A viral ad This ad is clearly designed to go viral also I enjoyed it, so I want to reward them. Notice one aspect of the viral strategy — the ad lasts amazingly long. TV ads are 30 seconds long, because they have to pay for every second. The shame shame shame goes on incredibly long — because youtube doesn’t charge by the second and making a strong impression is key to making people share it or uh copy a...

Massachusetts ACA Enrollment Exceeds Last Year, Charles Gaba, ACA Signups Blog Massachusetts: (January 14, 2018) saw an increased 285,000 signups for healthcare for 2019 which is up 6.6% YOY and with 9 days left until the ACA signup deadline. This comes even though Republicans and Trump have been sabotaging the ACA. Even more impressive, 97.2% (90% National Average) of enrollees have paid their 1st month fees. Republicans and Trump Implement the CSR...

Industrial production: strong finish to 2018 Industrial production for December was reported this morning at +0.3%, slightly better than estimates. But what was really surprising is how strong the manufacturing component was, up over 1%: With this reading, YoY industrial production for manufacturing improved to +3.4%, and overall production came in just below 4%: This is in contrast to the sharp slowdown we saw in both the December regional Fed indexes...

Whatever Happened To Iran? Who? What? Where? Long a headliner in the news, Iran has disappeared from the headlnes, and even the lower pages.  It has largely disappeared from the  news, after being the g=big headline for a long time.  This is probably good for Iran, despite its many flaws. I have made a big effort to find out its current economic status. The little data out there seems to suggest that not much is happening. GDP had been falling in the...