The Angry Bear

Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) “Unless they are replaced with something else temporarily, there will be chaos in this country and millions of Americans will be hurt.” Twelve Republicans and 12 Democrats signed on to the bill, which would continue ObamaCare’s insurer subsidies for two years and give states more flexibility to waive ObamaCare rules. Senator Alexander is talking about the impact of Trump canceling the CSR which pays...

“Hurricane adjusting” initial claims has proven its value For the last month, I deduced a “hurricane adjusted” number for initial claims, which showed that the previous underlying positive trend was intact, with the four week average remaining in the 230,000’s. That approach was borne out by this week’s report, which, at 222,000, was the lowest since 1973. Although I haven’t gone through the entire formal exercise, here’s how the numbers from the three...

Vis New York Times Growth becomes the overriding motivation — something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world. Facebook and Google can point to a greater utility that comes from being the central repository of all people, all information, but such market dominance has obvious drawbacks, and not just the lack of competition. As we’ve seen, the extreme concentration of wealth and power is a threat to our democracy by making...

Marxism-Leninism And The Chinese Communist Party Congress At this moment I am watching live on Bloomberg News the opening speech by President/Party General Secretary/Chairman of the Military Commission Xi Jinping of the once-every-five-years Chinese Communist Party Congress.  This is far more important than what one finds on other TV networks whether pro-Trump right now (how great his tax plan/tromping on immigrants and football players are) or...

Here’s the abstract of a discussion paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics by Felix Bransch and Michael Kvasnicka: Using data on articles published in the top-five economic journals in the period 1991 to 2010, we explore whether the gender composition of editorial boards is related to the publishing success of female authors and to the quality of articles that get published. Our results show that female editors reduce, rather than increase, the...

A couple of weeks ago, the House passed a Tax Reform Budget Resolution. Today, the Senate will take a vote on its Tax Reform Budget Resolution. Once passed, the differences will need to be resolved by both legislative bodies. President Trump met with the Senate Committee which included 6 Democratic Senators of which 5 are up for re-election in 2018. Trump impressed upon Senator Wyden the need for support of the Republican Tax Reform measure. Except the...

(Dan here…Stormy sends a reminder that the world has a real side as well…lifted from an e-mail)) Calling out the precursor to an Ecological Armageddon. Thought you might like to see this study—also written up in Guardian.  Economists are totally irrelevant.   Profit and money are their game….and that game is ending within our children’s lifetime. More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas See also:...

Iraq Conquers Kirkuk The central Iraqi government based in Baghdad has conquered oil-rich and ethnically-mixed Kirkuk from its recent Kurdish rulers, who hoped to continue ruling it as part of their recently declared independent state of (Iraqi) Kurdistan, clearly consisting of three provinces, but which they also wanted to include the fourth one of Kirkuk province. This now appears not to be going to happen. Juan Cole has made an excellent discussion of...

Underlying industrial production trend ex-hurricanes remains positive A few weeks ago, I suggested a hurricane workaround for industrial production. That approach was to average the four regional Fed indexes excluding Dallas, and add the Chicago PMI, and finally discount for the unusual strength this year in these regional indexes vs. production. Here was my conclusion: The average of the 5 is 22.9. Dividing that by 5 gives us +.5. Subtracting .3 gives...