The Angry Bear

Kudlow Menzie Chinn notes: Mr. Kudlow is apparently on the short list for new National Economic Committee chair. Maybe a good time to review some of his macro predictions. Yours truly goes back memory lane: But let’s turn back the clock to the first term of the Bush43 Administration when Kudlow writing for the National Review was all in defending Bush’s fiscal stimulus and arguing at several points how the labor market was booming even when it was not....

Labor force participation, unemployment, and wages: an update About a year ago I wrote a series of posts on the relationship between the unemployment rate, labor force participation, and wage growth. Especially in view of last Friday’s jobs report, which showed blockbuster hiring, but a continuation of tepid wage growth over 8 years into the expansion, now is a good time for an update. To recapitulate, history shows that wage growth is lags the economy,...

(Dan here…better late posted here than not…. )  by New Deal democrat HEADLINES: +313,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate unchanged at 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 -40,000 from 5.171 million to 5.131 million Part time for economic reasons: rose 171,000 from 4.989 million...

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...