The Angry Bear

Trump in Helsinki: “I do not see any reason why Russia would be responsible, I have great confidence in my intelligence people; but I will tell you that, President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Trump back in Washington D.C.: “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place. Could be other people also. A lot of people out there. There was no collusion at all,” in...

Is Trump Bailing Out Soybean Farmers Or Not? Chinese tariffs on US soybean exports have now kicked in, with China half the US soybean market, and exports much more important for soybeans than for corn, with the US producing half the world’s corn, but exporting less of it than soybeans.  Upshot is that while soybean prices have fallen roughly 20% since Trump started his trade war, corn prices have fallen noticeably less. Recognizing that soybeans are...

Lawfare blog published a solid read of the latest indictment announced by Rod Rosenstein. The indictment Friday morning of 12 Russian military intelligence officials in connection with the 2016 election hacks and the resulting distribution of purloined emails was not a total surprise. Observers of the Mueller investigation have been expecting it for a long time, particularly since the Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three companies over...

MSN reports Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds. Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals...

Real average and aggregate wages: July 2018 update As we close out this week devoted to jobs and wages, with the consumer price index having been reported yesterday, let’s take a look at real wages. By now you’ve probably read elsewhere that YoY wages for average workers actually declined slightly (-0.1%): But the flatness goes back further: all the way to February 2016: Real wages have only grown 0.4% in the last 2 years and 4 months. So...

A (mainly) business cycle explanation for this year’s better jobs growth The pace of job creation declined from averaging over 200,000 a month between Q2 2014 through Q2 2015 to 180,000 or less during most of 2017. This year, it has picked up noticeably to over 200,000 per month again: Why?  A basic analysis of the business cycle supplies an answer. To quickly refresh, long leading indicators tell us about the direction of the economy more than 1...

This is mostly a C&P as taken from Justin Frantz’s article One of the World’s Largest Steam Locomotives Is About to Make a Triumphant Return It is a fun post with a tad of economics tied to it. It was not seventy years ago and may be more like sixty years ago when I took the train with my father out to Buffalo New York. I remember seeing the old steam driven locomotives in Chicago. I do not think one of them made the pull to Buffalo. It would have...

A business cycle theory of labor force participation and wage growth I’ve devoted a lot of time and thought, and typed a lot of pixels of commentary, about wage growth in the last few years. Some of it has panned out: based on past expansions,I expected YoY wage growth to bottom consistent with an unemployment rate of about 6%. A little later I refined that to an underemployment rate of 9%. In retrospect that is indeed about when wage growth bottomed out...