The Angry Bear

The US is not in an economic Boom: midyear udpate At the beginning of this year I asked: Is the US economy going to enter a Boom in 2018? To recap, there is no standard definition of a Boom. But in my lifetime there have been two occasions when the “good times” feeling was palpable, and the economy was working extremely well on a very broad basis: the 1960s and the late 1990s tech era. During both times,  employment was rampant and average people...

The Most Important Issue At Helsinki No, folks, it was not the much ballyhooed issue of Russian election interference in 2016, which got so much attention because of Trump’s bungled and false statements at the press conference. Oh yes, for those of us who are convinced he is a bought out stooge of Putin, this all was very delicious, but it was far from the most important issue dealt with in Helsinki. As always, the most important issue between Russia and...

Posted by Barbara Hermel Bach on Friday, July 20, 2018 Seagull existentialism Posted by Philosophy Matters on Saturday, July 21, 2018 Same as it ever was…. Posted by Robert Sheidler-Lopez on Friday, July 20, 2018 Today's daily cartoon by Mary Lawton. Posted by The New Yorker on Thursday, July 19, 2018

US layoff rate at all time lows I don’t write about new jobless claims much anymore, mainly because it has been boringly good for a few years (outside of hurricane disruptions!).  But there are times like this week when I am particularly thankful that I am concentrating on the one thing – the economy – that is doing unequivocally well. Back in 2009 and 2010 when I was arguing with the Doomer dead-end recession double-dippers, I used to hear from people...

Trump Tariffs Hit Largest US Aluminum Company, ALCOA In the history of antitrust law, one of the most important rulings by the US Supreme Court came in 1945, when the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), long based in Pittsburgh with heavy Mellon family ownership, was ordered broken up for being a monopoly, following a ruling by Judge Learned Hand.  This was the famous “per se” ruling that said that simple domination of an industry by size was...

A projection was made by Fair Vote Org as to what will happen in the 2018 Congressional Elections based upon a series of variables such as whether a candidate is an incumbent, the geographical location or rural versus city, the underlying partisan lean of a district etc. If we apply those variables to this election; the likelihood of a House takeover even with a Blue Wave of angry Democrats going to the poll will not yield us what we hope to achieve. It...

[embedded content] An articulate president who reads books and tells things in a manner which does not demean. Huge change from Obama to Trump.

by Joseph Joyce Can Globalization Be Reversed? The wide-scale imposition of tariffs by the Trump administration is part of a larger effort to undo the expansion of markets around the globe and ensure that the goods consumed in the U.S. will be produced here. Will it be successful? And what would a world that represented a retreat from the globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s look like? Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times believes that the open...