The Angry Bear

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts.) by Robert Waldmann In a generally good article on how Trump got nothing out of Kim in Singapore, David Nakamura, Philip Rucker, Anna Fifield, and Anne Gearan make a false claims “Deals reached between Washington and Pyongyang under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama collapsed after North Korea conducted additional missile and nuclear tests.” This implies in particular that the...

Robert J. Samuelson Also Exaggerates Social Security Problems Not really a surprise, after all, it is Monday, and RJS has been at this for quite a long time at his post at WaPo.  But the recent release of the Trustees’ Report has not only gotten the Associated Press all bent out and shrieking “insolvency,” but I think with the push coming from the recent massive tax cuts that are swelling the budget deficit, the usual old gang of “cut the entitlements!”...

by Steve Roth What Causes Recessions? A Physicists’ Complex Systems Model I received some very interesting comments from Yaneer Bar-Yam to my recent Evonomics post— “Capital’s Share of Income is Far Higher than You Think.” He pointed me to his very interesting paper, “Preliminary steps toward a universal economic dynamics for monetary and fiscal policy.” I’m using this space to reply with with some stuff that can’t display in that comments space. I...

The disastrous German Emperor who was a doppelganger to Donald Trump: Kaiser Wilhelm You know the drill. It’s Sunday, so I write about whatever else is on my mind. I am presently reading Miranda Carter’s “George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm,” her 2009 biography of the three grandchildren of Queen Victoria who were respectively, the King of England, Tsar of Russia, and Kaiser of Germany at the time of the outbreak of World War 1. I was gobsmacked by her...

The Wage[s]-Lump Doctrine — still dogma after all these years “The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) to rally public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a...

This post “America’s allies should respond to steel tariffs with targeted sanctions on the Trump Organization” by Matthew Yglesias is brilliant (even though he is mainly agreeing with the prior brilliant article by Scott Gilmore “Trade sanctions against America won’t work. Sanctioning Trump himself might.” The proposal is so brilliant and the case for it so clear, that, I think, each title is enough to convey the idea. Yglesias elaborates while quoting...

Brief JOLTS update I’m still traveling, so this will be a quick update. In re yesterday’s JOLTS report (June 7), the main take seems to be that job openings were higher than the total number of unemployed, so presumably they could all be hired and we’d have actual full employment next month, right? I don’t think so. Month after month, hires have totaled considerably fewer than openings for several years. If full employment were so close, why wouldn’t...

AP Exaggerates Social Security Problems Dean Baker at Beat-the-Press has pointed out (sorry, not able to link to it) that Associated Press put out a tweet that presents an essentially hysterical story about future prospects for Social Security following the recent release of the Trustees.  This report says that as of 2026 Medicare and as of 2034 Social Security will face a “shortfall.”  However, the AP tweeted that what they face is “insolvency.” ...