The Angry Bear

I met Lynn while working with Alan Collinge of the Student Loan Justice Organization. She too has been working with Alan to call attention to the plight of students who took loans out to pay for college and the mishandling by servicers of them. The first story is of an older man who took out a Parent Plus Loan for his daughter, who has since died, and he is paying off the loan through garnished Social Security checks. The second story is a time table and...

Interest rates and jobs: a variation on the model Friday is nonfarm payrolls day, so in the absence more noteworthy economic news, let me follow up on Monday’s post in which I discussed “A simple model of interest rates and the jobs market.” In it, I suggested that: 1. a YoY increase in the Fed funds rate equal to the YoY% change in job growth has in the past almost infallibly been correlated with a recession within roughly 12 months. 2. the YoY...

The Final End Of The As-Is/Red Line Agreement In London yesterday visiting Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) allowed the signing of a set of trade memoranda with various British companies, including buying Typhoon aircraft, and many other things, 18 such deals, although some sources say only 14, total value maybe about $90 billion, although much of that already in the works and in the end may amount to what the $110 billion plus deals he...

It is unfair for me to pick on Paul Kane writing in the Washington Post, but he does seem to me to be a clear example of political reporters who interview operatives and quote them and do not look at relevant publicly available data. The main point of the article is that Republicans are in trouble, because they might lose a special congressional election in deep red PA-18 (which hasn’t gone Democratic since it was created with roughly its current...

Basil Moore dies I have just learned that prominent Post Keynesian economist, Basil Moore, died yesterday.  I do not know of what or how old he was, although he retired over a decade ago.  He is best known as the author of Horizontalists and Vericalists, in which he strongly argued for the endogeneity of money. In more recent years he had become interested in dynamic complexity economics. He long taught at Wesleyan in Connecticut.  In the final years of...

One third of the way to the 2020 Presidential election Today marks 16 months since the 2016 election, and 32 months before the one in 2020. We are one third of the way through.  Barring a major industrial or nuclear war, we are going to make it. The only major legislative accomplishment so far is the pro-cyclical, lopsided tax cut giveaway to corporations and the wealthy.  Additionally a bunch of lifetime judicial appointments have been made. On the...

by Joseph Joyce Not All Global Currencies Are The Same The dollar may be the world’s main global currency, but it does not serve in that capacity alone. The euro has served as an alternative since its introduction in 1999, when it took the place of the Deutschemark and the other European currencies that had also been used for that purpose. Will the renminbi become the next viable alternative? A new volume, How Global Currencies Work: Past, Present and...

As taken from the comments section. EMichael’s commentary on temperature and its impact. Interesting. “Air conditioning has changed demographics, too. It’s hard to imagine the rise of cities like Dubai or Singapore without it. As residential units spread rapidly across America in the second half of the 20th century, the population in the “sun belt” – the warmer south of the country, from Florida to California – boomed from 28% of Americans to 40%. As...

Cochrane Fails to Make His Case for the Trump Tax Cut Again John Cochrane recently noted: Stock Buybacks Are Proof of Tax Reform’s Success… A short oped for the Wall Street Journal here on stock buybacks. As usual, they ask me not to post the whole thing for 30 days though you can find it ungated if you search. I did search and found this. Does the Wall Street Journal get the fact that rebutting weak arguments against a policy are not exactly making an...