The Angry Bear

Twenty years ago, Paul Krugman warned that the liquidity trap was not just an issue in the economic history of the 30s. He noted there was every sign that Japan was in the liquidity trap in the 90s, then argued that a liquidity trap was theoretically possible. I guess one lesson is that economists even including Paul Krugman had more respect for theory back then. Now he, frankly, boasts about being decades ahead of the rest of the profession. (pdf...

Janet Colbert of Stop The Organized Pill Pushers Blog: “The death rate from Opioids continues to escalate year over year due to Florida ignoring the opiate epidemic for so long. Since STOPPNow (Stop The Organized Pill Pushers) started posting, the death rate went from 7/day in Florida. to 14/day. To keep the pressure on the legislature, I (Janet Colbert) will keep the Stoppnow.com site updated when we have bills that will need support to become law.”...

China, not automation, is by far the biggest factor in the decline of prime age labor force participation Perhaps the biggest mystery in economic analysis in the last few years has been trying to find an explanation for the big decline in labor force participation since 1999.  A recent NBER working paper by Abraham and Kearney has posited the most comprehensive answer to date.  Since it was summarized in this Washington Post article, I’m just going to...

Many Conservatives concede that the Conservative movement has gone bad. But they still insist that those of us who have been arguing this for decades were wrong for decades roughly until Trump came along. They find the case of famous conservative Dinesh D’Souza distinctly inconvenient. Washington Post Op-ed columnist Max Boot wrote “@DineshDSouza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book...

If you are under about 45 years of age, the odds are that you agree with one statement made by Dick Cheney: that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” As I mention from time to time, I am a fossil. I remember the “guns and butter” inflation of the late 1960s (Google is your friend) and the stagflationary 1970s. Here is a graph of the interest yield on the 10 year bond from 1981 through 2013: In an era of declining interest rates,...

Terry talking to his Brother Charly: “You shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me, just a little bit, so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money…I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.:” “On The Water Front” Trump; “I coulda had class. I coulda been a hero if I had rushed in there. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which I am.”...

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate: We should all take a lesson from the Stoneman-Douglas students 1. Give Donald Trump Precisely 5 Percent of Your Mental Energy They have no interest in talking to him or even about him. They have internalized the lesson that he is a symptom of the problem but unworthy of credit or blame. I suspect that if the rest of us ignored the president half as ably as they have, we’d all have vastly more emotional energy for the...

I haven’t been bothering to comment on initial jobless claims reports lately, for the simple fact that every week it’s the same story:  they’re good! In fact, the initial jobless claims reports are probably the single most positive aspect of the entire economic expansion.  For all intents and purposes, nobody is being laid off! For initial jobless claims even to be giving a “caution signal” about the economy, I would need the YoY comparison to...

by David Zetland  (reposted from Aguanomics) What went wrong in Capetown? I asked that question of Mike Muller, who has been working on water issues there for decades. He referred me to this op/ed he wrote and — more important — the inadequate response from a local city councillor. [Tl;dr: Failure to invest against risk from “inadequate rain” — a problem that climate change will exacerbate.] Taps are running dry — and we are all to blame Water supply...