The Angry Bear

Using crime and public safety as a political issue in an election year, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez: “’I don’t believe that police officers should be under this constant threat of lawsuits that will often cause them to pause, if they’re following their training, there should be something that protects them.’ The bill would protect cops and citizens from the ‘massive payouts that taxpayers are giving crooks and thieves who are hurt or injured by...

Lest we forget: David Dayen’s Weekly Newsletter Politico notes today that the 90-day emergency declared actually ends in a couple weeks, and we’re in essentially the same place that we were before the declaration. Trump has not formally proposed any new resources or spending, typically the starting point for any emergency response. He promised to roll out a “really tough, really big, really great” advertising campaign to spread awareness about...

JOLTS report confirms November payrolls strength I’m changing my presentation of JOLTS data somewhat compared with the last year or two.  At this point I’ve pretty much beaten the dead horses of (1) “job openings” are soft and unreliable data, and should be ignored in contrast with the hard “hires” series; and (2) the overall trend is that of late expansion but no imminent downturn.So let’s start a little differently, by comparing nonfarm payrolls from...

Negative Interest Rates and a Term Structure Puzzle James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending on goods and services. Please read the entire post including some interesting...

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met Wednesday. and the excuse? “Certain Washington politicians choose to fight for foreign countries, but President Trump will always fight for the American people,” spokesman Raj...

Does the United States Have A “Poland Problem”? It certainly looks like it. Again, for anybody not having seen one of these, a “Poland problem” involves an apparent disconnect between economics and politics, nations with reasonably well performing economies where the populace becomes unhappy and supports opposition, especially “populist” nationalist authoritarian candidates, with 2015 victory in Poland of the Law and Justice Party the poster boy for...

In the next evolution of economics taking shape around us and among us, perhaps no school has been so transformational over recent decades as a loose, worldwide group best described as “accounting-based” economists. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), with its central tenet of “stock-flow consistency” (or stock-flow coherence) is at the center and forefront of this group. These accounting-based economists more than any others managed to accurately predict our...

A US economic Boom in 2018? For the last several years, I have tried to identify several graphs that most bear watching over the ensuing 12 months. This year, in addition to watching bond yields like everybody else, the data that most bears watching, it seems to me, can be summed up in the question: Is the US economy about to enter a Boom? The recent economic news has almost all been good. In particular the unemployment rate has dropped as low as 4%....