The Angry Bear

Shock EU Court Decision Strikes Blow Against Investment Arbitration With all the dreary news we’ve seen this week, could you stand some good news? The battle against investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) got a huge boost in March when the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in Slovak Republic v. Achmea B.V. (“Achmea”) that ISDS is contrary to EU law. The decision was something of a surprise because the preliminary analysis (“opinion,”...

Great new Tax Justice Network podcast on how “Bean Counters…Broke Capitalism” The June 28 Taxcast is out with a focus on the Big Four accounting firms. Richard Brooks is the author of Bean Counters: The triumph of the accountants and how they broke capitalism (order here in the UK and here in the US) which documents accountants’ involvement in some of the world’s worst financial scandals, not least of which is the promotion of tax havens. The new...

by Joseph Joyce The New Trade Wars The U.S. and China are headed down a road of retaliatory trade restrictions. Stock prices are falling in response to the impact of such measures on corporate profits, while U.S. firms reconsider their global supply chains. But one curious aspect of the situation is why it has taken this long to flare up. The “global imbalances” of the early 2000s were the Chinese trade surpluses and the U.S. deficits. These received...

May personal spending returns to typical late cycle pattern The consumer continues to do okay. That is the message from personal income and spending as reported for May this morning. First of all, let’s compare the YoY% growth in real personal spending (blue) with real retail sales (red): For the last 50 years, during all business cycles but one, retail sales rose faster than, and ran ahead of, spending during the first part of the cycle, and...

Excerpts from “The Effect of an Eight Hours’ Day on Wages and the Unemployed” by  Charles Beardsley, Jr. (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Jul., 1895), pp. 450-459): The argument of workingmen that the general adoption of an eight hours’ day would raise wages and absorb the unemployed is well known. A reduction in hours of work would be equivalent to the withdrawal from the ranks of men now employed of a certain number of laborers. The...

Immigrant Child Abuse Agency (ICAA) In my Take Back ICE, I wrote: I would hope the leaders of ICE would speak up and strongly object to what the Demagogue in Chief has done with their agency but to date they seem to be intimated from doing what is right. Some good news: The political backlash against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has turned so intense that leaders of the agency’s criminal investigative division sent a letter last week to...

Drum honor role. I recently criticized Kevin Drum, so I am pleased to think especially highly of this post which I think you should read (also, as Drum says, always click the link especially if it is a vox.com link) My comment I am always impressed by your insights, but, that said, I think this post is important. In particular, I think you have coined an important word “government-ish” which belongs in the lexicon next to “truthiness”. As all 3 of you...

Refurbishing The Trump Economics Team Rumors are floating on the internet that NEC Chair Lawrence Kudlow is looking for new people to join the team advising President Trump on economics.  Of course, the obvious place to start would be with him, a non-economist, although he has played one on TV a lot, who also has one of the worst documented forecasting records around, poo-pooing both the housing bubble and the early signs of the Great Recession a decade...

The yield curve is already signaling a slowdown Throughout this expansion, I have had a sneaking suspicion that the yield curve (the difference in interest rates between short and long term bonds) would be the indicator most likely to fail. Originally that was because we are in a very non-inflationary period similar to that which prevailed between the 1920s and 1950s. After 1929, at no time during the 1930s, 1940s, or early 1950s did the yield curve...

(Dan here…more to come) by Joseph Joyce On the Road to…China I have just returned from the 4th HenU / INFER Workshop on Applied Macroeconomics in Kaifeng, China, which was organized by Makram El-Shaghi and Zhang Lin. There were many interesting presentations that are listed in the program.