The Angry Bear

(Dan here…re posted from March 7, Angry Bear) by run 75441 There are no loud guns shots in the middle of the night. No screams for help or sounds of cars speeding away. No police sirens or flashing lights. It is pretty quiet when someone ODs on Opioids unless someone finds them before it is too late. As I wrote earlier; “From 2006 to 2015, pharmaceutical companies spent $880 million in lobbyingstate and federal legislatures and contributing to campaigns...

I almost always agree with Kevin Drum who is, among other things, a brilliant economist even thoug (or largely because) he didn’t study economics much in college. But I don’t entirely agree with his one minute explanation of the importance of the yield curve for macroeconomic forecasting. the ever-fascinating yield curve, which tracks the difference between long-term and short-term treasury bond yields. Normally the long-term yield is higher to compensate...

(Dan here…From Esquire comes this note from the Boston Globe): We begin with good news up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), where Attorney General Maura Healey, who does not punch down, has opened hostilities against the pharmaceutical companies that have raked in the profits from the opioid crisis. From The Boston Globe: She asserts that the privately held company and 16 of its key directors and executives actively obfuscated the truth about...

by Peter Turchin What Is the Role of Morality in a Capitalist Economy?  published at Evonomics is worth a visit…it is academic but can offer material for discussion, involving several economists.  I am not going to try to summarize.

The ACLU’s Ría Tabacco Mar reviewed a recent SCOTUS decision in the NYT. South Dakota is being allowed to murder a man rather than commit him to a life time of hell in a natural life sentence . Charles Rhines was convicted of murdering a man while robbing a Dunkin Donut store he used to work at and was fired from a couple of weeks earlier. The jury in deciding Charles Rhines fate in deliberation sent questions to the judge asking; Would Rhines have a...

Gimme shelter update: housing purchase affordability Let’s update one measure of housing prices: comparing of the purchasing power of buyers vs. the price a typical house.  There are at least 3 indexes. First, here is the N.A.R.’s “Housing affordability index,” updated through May. This compares their estimate of median household income vs. the median price of an existing home: Note that the data isn’t seasonally adjusted, so there is an annual...

In my original post, I didn’t say much about the overt racist expression in Gomper and the A. F. of L.’s  advocacy for Chinese exclusion. I guess that is because I read the stuff voluminously a couple of decades ago and it by now it just seemed to me it was common knowledge. Of course it isn’t. I was astonished and appalled when I first read it. Not so much at the vileness as at the obsessive repetition of that vileness. The pamphlet, Some Reasons for...

Further comments about the state of the housing market Here are some additional salient comments about the housing market right now. 1. Existing home sales are completely stagnant Not only did existing home sales fall for the month, not only are they down slightly YoY, but they are now less than 2% higher than where they were 3 years ago: In May 2015, houses sold at a 5.35 million annualized rate. In today’s repot they were reported as selling at...

Stephen Miller, architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy is getting a lot of bad press these days. Some wags (and even relatives?) juxtapose Miller’s photo to one of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, insinuating likeness of facial expression is a predictor of ideological leaning and propaganda technique. The comparison is as unhelpful as it is unfair. A more apt comparison would be with Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American...