The Angry Bear

(Dan here…another post lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Contra Mannheim First rules of blogging.  I type as I please.I haven’t read anything by Karl Mannheim but I think he wrote the phrase “social construction of truth”. I think that is a bad phrase and all use of it or similar phrases should be criticized. My reason is simple. I think anything true which can be said including the phrase “social construction of truth” can also be said using...

This is a post I’ve been meaning to put up all week (after all, this week was going to be very slow on data and news, right?). As the expansion gets more and more mature, the *relative* performance of certain measures of improvement become more interesting.  One of those is the comparison between U3 unemployment, and the broader U6 underemployment measure. While we only have about 25 years of data, so caution is warranted, generally speaking,...

The first premise of Adam Smith’s famous metaphor about an “invisible hand” leading individuals to promote the public interest, although they intend only private gain, was that there is only so much work to go ’round. That is, Smith assumed there was a certain quantity of work to be done — a “lump of labor.” He didn’t tacitly assume it — he stated it plainly: As the number of workmen that can be kept in employment by any particular person must bear a...

(Dan here…Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Drum goes easy on Goldberg It is progress that hack conservatives are bothsidesing now. Jonah Goldberg correctly notes that the problem isn’t just Trump but also broader extreme partizanship. He asserts that both parties are to blame. He seems to know he can’t defend this assertion and declines to try. I think he may be sincere — the extreme partisanship of Republicans means that in the Conservabubble...

With the market falling like it did over the past week it may prove valuable to look at the PE and some other economic reports.  In my PE model the market became overvalued in December and January.  The last observation is at the market close on Thursday, 8 February 2018. the previous two observation are the end of December and January values. Notice that the PE did not rise until December . As of November, 2017 the market PE was still below where it was...

Jobless claims make another record low One reason not to get excited about the last week’s stock market swoon is that it isn’t being confirmed by any other short term leading indicators.  Most significantly, jobless claims. The 4 week moving average of new jobless claims has fallen below 225,000. This is yet another 40 year record low. In fact, with the exception of six weeks in the early 1970s, it’s a new 50 year low. And adjusted for population...

Hat tip Linda Beale contact forwards this Propublica job tracker post: What Happened to All the Jobs Trump Promised? President Trump has made many claims promising that individual companies such as Amazon, Alibaba and Boeing will hire large – and specific – numbers of American workers, a total of 2.4 million in all … We found that only about 206,000 of those jobs have been created so far … Roughly 136,000 of those were genuinely new positions, as opposed...

Along the line in the movie “The Sixth Sense, I see dead people. They don’t know they’re dead.” Repubs; “I see Secret Societies, others do not know they exist. They are everywhere.” Daily Beast’s Rick Wilson; “The story was falling apart even before the Moron Caucus beclowned themselves with the ‘Secret Society’ theme, because the memo obviously hadn’t done enough to reduce the Republicans in stature and seriousness. Seizing on a single, obviously joking...

A comment about the markets for the average reader This is a post aimed at the generally Progressive audience of this blog who followed us over from way back in our days at Daily Kos, rather than the financially sophisticated audience who have picked us up since (but of course everybody is welcome to read and appreciate!). Anyway, at times like this over 10 years ago Bonddad used to write posts like “A comment about the markets” for the DK audience,...