The Angry Bear

Real wages in 2017 Now that we have the report on consumer prices for December, let’s take a look at what happened with real wages in 2017. Consumer prices increased +0.1% in December, and wages for non-managerial workers rose 0.3%,  This for that month the average worker earned 0.2% more. For the year, the nominal wages of non-managerial workers rose 2.4%, while prices increased 2.1%, meaning that for the entire year workers saw a whopping 0.3%...

Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions.  Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on in the economy. Specifically, Galbraith is worried that the consumer is the only game in town — and that can’t last....

Via Alternet: 4 Ways Martin Luther King Was More Radical Than You Thought The slain civil rights leader was a critic of capitalism, the Vietnam War, and championed reproductive rights. By Igor Volsky / ThinkProgress January 20, 2014, 7:32 AM GMT Every January, Martin Luther King, Jr. is universally honored as a national hero who preached a peaceful fight against racial injustice. This saintly image is quite a departure from the kind of attacks the...

A Reminder That It Was George W. Bush Who Was Responsible For Letting North Korea Get Nuclear Weapons Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution has provided a link to a 2004 article from Washington Monthly by Fred Kaplan that lays out in great detail how George W. Bush, strongly backed by Cheney and Rumsfeld and against the views of Colin Powell, undid the agreement that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton made with the North Koreans in 1994 to shut down the North’s...

Using crime and public safety as a political issue in an election year, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez: “’I don’t believe that police officers should be under this constant threat of lawsuits that will often cause them to pause, if they’re following their training, there should be something that protects them.’ The bill would protect cops and citizens from the ‘massive payouts that taxpayers are giving crooks and thieves who are hurt or injured by...

Lest we forget: David Dayen’s Weekly Newsletter Politico notes today that the 90-day emergency declared actually ends in a couple weeks, and we’re in essentially the same place that we were before the declaration. Trump has not formally proposed any new resources or spending, typically the starting point for any emergency response. He promised to roll out a “really tough, really big, really great” advertising campaign to spread awareness about...

JOLTS report confirms November payrolls strength I’m changing my presentation of JOLTS data somewhat compared with the last year or two.  At this point I’ve pretty much beaten the dead horses of (1) “job openings” are soft and unreliable data, and should be ignored in contrast with the hard “hires” series; and (2) the overall trend is that of late expansion but no imminent downturn.So let’s start a little differently, by comparing nonfarm payrolls from...

Negative Interest Rates and a Term Structure Puzzle James Hamilton provided us with another interesting discussion on negative interest rates: we now have several years of experience from Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, and the European Central Bank in which the central bank successfully induced negative interest rates in hopes of stimulating a greater level of spending on goods and services. Please read the entire post including some interesting...