The Angry Bear

The October JOLTS report: very good employment market continues, just below best levels Monday’s JOLTS report for October was, surprisingly, a little weaker than the employment report from one month ago, that I described at the time as perhaps the best in the entire expansion. But this is a relative statement; basically, most of the series were only a little off their recent best readings: Quits were just below their all-time high in August, and July...

Shiller Hystericizes The US Housing Market I have the deepest respect for Robert Shiller, who has been one of the most serious students of the dynamics of speculative bubbles there is, winning a well-deserved Nobel Prize for his work on this important topic.  One of the more significant parts of his work has been on housing bubbles in particular, with his Case-Shiller indices being the most widely watched housing price measures in the US. Furthermore,...

American Journal of Public Health: “The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End-of-Life Care” December 2015, Melissa D. Aldridge, PhD, MBA and Amy S. Kelley, MD, MSHS There has been a lot of talk and presentation on End of Life care and its high costs. “The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End of Life Care” reviews those costs and expands the topic beyond End of Life to all the population with chronic conditions and functional limitations. FIGURE 1Estimated...

On, Wisconsin? As most regular readers here know, I have long and old connections to the state of Wisconsin, having gone to high school, undergraduate and graduate school, as well as having family members there since then, with me visiting on a regular basis.  When I first moved there back in 1963, the state had the reputation not only as a Progressive stronghold, the home of “Fighting Bob” LaFollette as well as the location of Ripon, where in 1854 the...

Weekly Indicators for December 3 – 7 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The long leading forecast has now been negative for four weeks in a row. Please remember that clicking and reading, besides being educational, helps reward me for the work I put into this.

November jobs report: another good report with some signs of deceleration HEADLINES: +155,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 3.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.2% from 7.4% to 7.6% Here are the headlines on wages and the broader measures of underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  rose +88,000 from 5.309 million to 5.397 million Part time for economic reasons: rose +181,000 from 4.621 million...

Last December 2017, Envision Healthcare Corporation paid an approximate $30 million to settle allegations for subsidiary EmCare doctors getting bonus payments for admitting patients to hospitals when it was not necessary. History: A subsidiary of Envision, EmCare is a provider of physician services to emergency departments, inpatient services for hospitals, acute care surgery, trauma and general surgery, women’s and children’s services, radiology /...

Brookings Institute points us to: Big, techy metros like San Francisco, Boston, and New York with populations over 1 million have flourished, accounting for 72 percent of the nation’s employment growth since the financial crisis. By contrast, many of the nation’s smaller cities, small towns, and rural areas have languished. Smaller metropolitan areas (those with populations between 50,000 and 250,000) have contributed less than 6 percent of the nation’s...