The Angry Bear

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddad blog) There Is No Commodity Based Inflation Consider the following charts (the top three area daily; the bottom is weekly):  All prices are either declining or stable. The only major ETF that is showing strength is the industrial metals ETF (this is a weekly chart): This explains why non-food and energy prices are subtracting from prices: This is one reason why overall inflation is so...

Many have noted that Trump has the strange idea that he can destroy the US health care financing system & people will blame Obama. I actually think he is wrong about this — many polls show that a solid majority of US adults say they will Republicans responsible (yes I know it’s unfair to think they have the responsibility just because they have all the power). But before that comes the question of whether Republicans can destroy the ACA without...

They are monsters The President and his GOP majorities in Congress are monsters. As one commentator on NPR put it yesterday afternoon, the President’s default mode is to toss an armed hand grenade into a room in order to create chaos.  He can then pick out the most vulnerable, and use that leverage to enter into a win-lose deal. Meanwhile, having been emboldened by the 2011 Debt Ceiling Debacle, the Congressional GOP majorities, who haven’t been able to...

Trump’s Healthcare Executive Order Trump Signs Executive Order relaxing ACA health insurance rules. About a week or so ago, I had read this elsewhere, mentioned it, and was told there was no way this would happen. Similar to the three attempts to defund the ACA, Trump is doing what he says the Senate could not do and that is to take healthcare insurance away from the citizenry. More of Trump’s Executive Order down the page. Children’s Health Insurance...

According to Modern Healthcare: “In a brash move likely to roil insurance markets, President Donald Trump will ‘immediately’ halt payments to insurers under the Affordable Care Act. Before sunrise Friday morning, Trump went on Twitter to urge Democrats to make a deal: ‘The Democrats ObamaCare is imploding, massive subsidy payments to their pet insurance companies has stopped. Dems should call me to fix!’ The Department of Health and Human Services had...

By Steve Roth  (originally published at Evonomics) How Amazon’s Accounting Makes Rich People’s Income Invisible Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company makes profits, it will have to pay taxes on them. (At least nominally, in theory, 35%!) Then you and your investors will have to pay taxes on them again when...

IMF Fiscal Monitor: Progressive Taxation Need Not Deter Growth The latest from the IMF is a must read for progressives even if it runs contrary to the nonsense coming out of the White House: At the global level, inequality has declined substantially over the past three decades, but within national boundaries, the picture is mixed: some countries have experienced a reduction in inequality while others, particularly advanced economies, have seen a...

Hassett’s Evidence on Transfer Pricing and the U.S. Trade Deficit In my last post, I questioned Kevin Hassett’s claim that transfer pricing manipulation was responsible for half of our trade deficit and asked what was the paper he referenced. We have the text of his speech: There is another important factor to consider when thinking about how these changes will affect the economy. A recent NBER working paper (Guvenen, Mataloni, Raisser and Ruhl 2017)...

Puerto Rico, Transfer Pricing, and Kevin Hassett Scott Greenberg provided a nice summary of what section 936 was and how its expiration had contributed to Puerto Rico’s economic and fiscal difficulties: beginning in 1976, section 936 of the tax code granted U.S. corporations a tax exemption from income originating from U.S. territories. In addition to section 936, the Puerto Rican corporate tax code gave significant incentives for U.S. corporations...