The Angry Bear

(Dan here…lifted from an e-mail) I’m not registered with seeking alpha so I cannot read the whole article (I had sent), but what I read looks a lot like what I’ve written over the years.  Here are some statements which, working off memory, I have written posts about and which I think are supported by US macroeconomic data from the last 100 years: 1.  A tax cut generally gooses the economy in the short run (one – two years). That story is a Republican...

Also know as collectors vintage bitcoins. This is a crazy idea with no redeeming social value. BitCoin is valuable only because people expect it to be valuable in the future. I am sure there is BitCoin bubble, but it wouldn’t be that strange for for something useless to be valuable. Cancelled stamps may be valuable. Old coins have numismatic value. Old coins hmmm … pity BitCoins are just numbers uh first recorded on a given date … hmmm OK so I want to...

Flynn Bails, but Don’t Get Your Hopes Up I haven’t seen anything yet to convince me that the Putin-Trump collaboration was a big deal.  Ugly and unprincipled, sure, but politically consequential, probably not. A contrary view, expressed by Harry Litman in today’s New York Times, is that this is the beginning of the end for the Trumpster.  The evidence is accumulating that, between his election in November of last year and his inauguration on January 20...

It appears almost certain that the ACA (Obamacare) mandate will be eliminated. This actually means that Obamacare will correspond to Obama’s 2008 proposal which didn’t include a mandate. Obama claimed it would work (he was lying or, to be polite, playing 11 dimensional chess). Can ACA without a mandate work at all ? Can it be modiefied so that it works better ? People who know a hell of a lot more than I do about health economics have struggled with...

[embedded content] Douglas Holz-Eakin balanced with Kimberly A. Clausing in the NYT.   Link in the picture.  To think that looting could be so calmly described with ballance.

I will ease the pain from this early morning (when GOP senate slashed corporate taxes) by escaping into fantasy, I mean theory, but I repeat myself. A key theoretical argument about taxing profits (due to Diamond and Mirrlees I think) is that the tax can be very very high if firms maximize profits, because maximizing 0.5X is just the same problem as maximizing X. This is a tax on pure profits (profits minus capital times the cost of capital) . The...

Is Bitcoin A Speculative Bubble?  There are at least two definitions of a speculative bubble.  The first, and most widely accepted, is that it involves a price of an asset that rises substantially above its fundamental and then falls back towards that fundamental.  The other, not necessarily all that clearly distinguishable from the former, involves an asset price that rises due to people buying due to an expectation that they will get a capital gain from...

by Hale Stewart (originally published at Bonddad blog) Where’s Waldo, er, I Mean Inflation? Just a quick note: according to the 3, 6 and 12 month moving average of Y/Y percentage change in total and core PCE price indexes, there is little to no inflation to worry about.

(Dan here…reposted from an earlier analysis,) by Linda Beale Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s Forked Tongue on Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Shortly before the inauguration, Steve Mnuchin discussed the incoming administration’s tax plans and announced the Mnuchin Rule–that “[a]ny reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.”   EXCLUSIVE: Steve Mnuchin says there will be...