The Angry Bear

Blowing Up The Iran Nuclear Deal This is probably Donald Trump’s biggest mistakes, his refusal to certify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran and his fullout abrogation of it by announcing the reimposition of full economic sanctions against Iran, although we had not fully undone those sanctions anyway.  An immediate victim in the US of this action will be Boeing workers who were to benefit from a $3 billion contract Boeing had with...

In the Public Interest has published a new report (pdf) on the impact of charter schools and public school funding in CA: In a first-of-its-kind analysis, this report reveals that neighborhood public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools. In 2016-17, charter schools cost the Oakland Unified School District $57.3 million, the San Diego Unified School...

Passivity is a key term in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: 12. The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. 13. The basically tautological...

Charles Gaba: Why Risk Pools are Bad [embedded content]Charles Gaba at ACA Signups.net has an excellent explanation on how Risk Pools work and how they harm those amongst us who depend upon a community rating system to balance out cost. Michigan Medicaid Wavier Strikes at the Poor The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported on how Michigan’s Medicaid Proposal would lead to “Large Coverage Losses” harming Low Income Workers. The coverage reduction...

In The USA, there is a striking negative correlation between the relative price of housing and GDP growth over the following 5 years Given this simple correlation, it is possible to forecast the great recession using just that variable and a trend. In fact, the forecast recession is even more severe than the actual recession. This note examines other developed countries using the data set assembled by Oscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick and Alan Taylor...

March JOLTS report: powerful further evidence of a taboo against rasing wages The March JOLTS report this morning is powerful further evidence that raising wages (or training new workers) has become a taboo. Just about everyone thinks that, faced with a worker shortage, “rational” employers will offer higher wages to fill the empty skilled positions. This in turn will draw more marginal potential workers into open unskilled positions. That’s the theory,...

The simple jobs and interest rates model generates a yellow flag Several months ago, I started toying with a simple model of interest rates and job growth.* Based on the historical evidence, I suggested that: 1. a YoY increase in the Fed funds rate equal to the YoY% change in job growth has in the past almost infallibly been correlated with a recession within roughly 12 months. Figure 1 2. the YoY change in the Fed funds rate (inverted in the graph...

(Dan here…there is a lot of discussion about reasons for wages not keeping pace with productivity and the like.  There are also discussions on the impact outsourcing, the role of monopolies and monopsony. and outright making it a policy to keep wages from rising.) Spencer thinks: Even though the year over year change in average hourly wages appears stable, if you look at the 3 month rate of change it shows wage growth accelerating significantly....