The Angry Bear

I was bouncing around my twitter feed and landed on this tweet which in turn took me to a paper entiteld Childhood family income, adolescent violent criminality and substance misuse: quasi-experimental total population study. The paper appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2014. Here’s the basic summary: Background Low socioeconomic status in childhood is a well-known predictor of subsequent criminal and substance misuse behaviours but the causal...

[embedded content] Via Crooks and Liars

by  Joseph Joyce The IMF’s Flexible Credit Line The policy conditions attached to the disbursement of an IMF loan have long been the subject of controversy. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the IMF introduced a new lending program—the Flexible Credit Line—that allowed its members to apply for a loan before a crisis took place. If approved, the member can elect to draw upon the arrangement in the event of a crisis without conditionality, and there...

Happy 8th Independence Day, economic expansion! In lieu of a more traditional Independence Day post, in view of the fact that the economic expansion turned 8 years old this week, I thought I would take a moment to highlight how far we have come.  Because as mediocre as some things are, we have come a long, long way since the dark days of June 30, 2009. Unemployment has fallen from a high of 10.0 to 4.2%, and underemployment has fallen from 17.1% to 8.4%:...

Robert Samuelson At The Washington Post Is Bashing Social Security Yet Again Yet again. I grant that he did not do  it at length or present a lot of clearly incorrect nonsense.  But bash Social Security he did, using an old ruse to do so, combining it with Medicare to invoke a long term deficit danger due to the two of them together, when in fact it is well known that it is the Medicare part of that projection of future spending that leads to all the scary...

Via Naked Capitalism comes Daniel Gros, Director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels. Originally published at VoxEU. Here is the introductory summary: Trade and international financial transactions have grown massively in recent decades. This phenomenon, also called globalization, is often described as a ‘mega-trend’. Business and political leaders never tire of repeating that ‘globalization’ is the future, that it delivers more jobs and...

Comments on Profit and Capital Yeah, I know, Marx wrote three volumes on this, and in 2014 Piketty published in English a more than 700 page book on it that ended up on the bestseller list, although neither of these resolved the long-running debates about the nature of profit or of capital, which continue to swirl.  We have seen recently someone claiming that distinguishing between retained and distributed earnings is the key to understanding profit, and...

Reader EM put this comment up in the AB open thread. I thought it was interesting enough to place on AB as I also wonder about the question being asked and the answer; “can a state divert Medicare funds to support a state single payer system?” The simple answer is “no,” Medicare funds can not be allocated to states and the same holds true for VA funding for healthcare and the tax credit to companies for healthcare insurance. Congress would have to approve it...