The Angry Bear

Why I’m not impressed by January’s 2.9% YoY wage growth I wanted to follow up on why I dissented Friday from the near-consensus take that workers finally got a nice raise, with many citing hikes in the minimum wage. As you may recall, the YoY% change in the average hourly earnings of all employees rose 2.9% as of January. That was the story in, for example, Marketwatch: Average hourly wages jumped 9 cents, or 0.3%, to $26.74, according to the Bureau of...

End Of The Obama-Yellen Economy For the past year the US has been essentially operating on an Obama-Yellen economy, at least as far as the big macroeconomic policies have been concerned in terms of fiscal and monetary policies.  We saw basically a continuation of what had been seeing in previous years, steady growth with inflation under control.  There was some uptick in wage growth, although that had already started in the previous year.  He has...

January jobs report: good headline growth, mostly negative internals. UPDATE: THE BOSSES GAVE THEMSELVES A RAISE HEADLINES: +200,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate rose 0.1% from 8.1% to 8.2% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: declined -137,000 from 5.308 million to 5.171 million Part time for economic...

Kind of hard to ignore the blathering of a Republican jerk on the pay increase a school secretary will receive as a result of Trump/Republican tax break. Gosh darn, she can afford a Costco membership now! What an ass . . . He needs to go. Deleted by Ryan afterwards. Secretary was being sarcastic.

David Dayen at The Intercept points us to the latest on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: On Tuesday night, he (Trump)stood before the nation and boasted about the lowest unemployment rate on record for African-Americans. But just hours before his State of the Union address, his lieutenant and handpicked head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, told staff in an email that he was seizing control of the unit responsible for...

I’m not sure this is of general interest, but I would like to argue (again) with Glenn Greenwald. In this tweet, he asks an interesting and important question The FBI, and many Democrats, insisted vehemently that release of the Nunes Memo would endanger national security. Now that we’ve all read it, is there anyone who believes that this argument was even remotely true or honest? Yes. This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions....

Distractions,  Distractions Wow!  We have a great controversy!  A squib of a memo by the House Intel Comm has completely devoured the media.  A constitutional crisis!  Egad!  In two weeks, or maybe two months, it will be nothing.  But for now, well, very very very serious. At a minimum it has distracted everybody from Trump’s gloriously successful State of the Union speech, which was so well received until this distraction that he thinks will bring about...

Via Naked Capitalism: In a scoop, Business Insider reports on how Amazon is creating massive turnover and pointless misery at Whole Food by imposing a reign of terror impossible and misguided productivity targets. Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to Amazon will see its abuse of out of Whole Foods workers as confirmation of an established pattern. And even more tellingly, despite Whole Foods supposedly being a retail business that Bezos would...