The Angry Bear

No, record job openings in JOLTS do not mean that everything is Teh Awesome! Once again most of the commentary on yesterday’s JOLTS report for April was that job openings jumped, so everything is Teh Awesome! <  Sigh  > To recap one more time… In the one and only complete business cycle that we have for this data: First, hires peaked. They started a long plateau in 2005, making a 3 month peak in late 2005, with no meaningful progress thereafter. Second,...

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts: My Sources Tell me that in the Closed Session Comey Said he has proof Trump is a Russian agent and a Lizard person COTTON: “Do you believe Donald Trump colluded with Russia?” COMEY: “It’s a question I don’t think I should answer in open session.” Sen Cotton has a degree from Harvard Law where they didn’t teach him to never ask a question unless he knows how the witness will answer. I dn’t think Comey is going to tell...

Trump Blows Up The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Well, maybe it has blown itself up, but Trump’s supposedly triumphant visit to Saudi Arabia looks to have exacerbated underlying tensions within the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), whose members include Saudi Arabia (KSA), Kuwait,Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman. This was the part of Trump’s overseas trip that most US media has accepted as being a nearly great performance...

A Day in the Life of the jobs market, May 2017 Fifty years ago, when I was a little teenybopper,  his album came out and blew me away: Why bore you with this ancient Boomer reminiscence? Because the unemployment rate has only been lower than last month’s 4.3% in only six of the last 50 years, and only two of them in the last 46 years: Since February 1970, the only time the unemployment rate has been less than it is now is from 1999 into 2001. That’s not...

Peter Dorman calls attention to a NYT Upshot column by Neil Irwin about the cost of climate change. For Irwin, the question can be framed as a matter of discounting, “A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar in 100 years. But what discount rate you set determines how much more.” As Irwin admits, the discount rate is a “business concept.” His conclusion, then, follows exclusively from a business concept of “how, as a...

reader alert: I am going to quote and discuss Trump tweets “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That’s because they used knives and a truck!” My immediate reaction was to tweet this this is why we should have a gun debate right now. The fact that 3 terrorists killed 7 victims not 70 shows the benefits of UK gun control. In the USA a single terrorist killed 49 people . My reactions to the horrible news from London included the thought...

by Peter Dorman   (originally published at Econospeak) The Cost of Climate Change: It’s Not About Psychology You know there are problems with economics when things that are perfectly reasonable in the context of economic theory are clearly absurd once you step out of it.  Case in point: the claim in today’s New York Times piece by Neil Irwin that the economic cost of climate change vs the actions we’d need to mitigate it depends on “how, as a society, we...

Economics is a simple field. Just about everything can be described in terms of supply and demand. If the supply of something is scarce but the demand for it is strong, its price rises. On the other hand, if there is a lot of supply but little demand, its price will go down. Now, buyers and sellers can engage in certain strategies to weight the scales. For example, sellers of a product can band together (perhaps by buying each other out) to achieve some...

May jobs report: nothing more nor less than a decent late cycle report HEADLINES: +138,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.4% to 4.3% U6 underemployment rate down -0.2% from 8.6% to 8.4% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: down -146,000 from 5.707 million to 5.561 million Part time for economic reasons: down -53,000 from 5.272...