The Angry Bear

by Barkley Rosser  (originally published at Econospeak) Saint Janet Yellen: The Best Fed Chair Ever? OK, so the immediate reaction of many to this title might be to laugh, but I challenge anybody reading this to name another Fed Chair who was clearly better than she is.  I do not think you can.  However, one reason why one may not think much about her is that things have been so inconsequential since she has been Chair.  Nothing much has happened.  She...

A little Ella Fitzgerald for you today. Kind of fits with what is going on in the US today. [embedded content] Over at Vox, Matt Yglesias has an interesting article on the Trump Transition Team ordering government economists to cook up rosy economic forecasts. With his far reaching economic “it will be great” promises during the election, delusional Trump has laid out a “blue skies” future which is likely unobtainable with the past economic growth of less...

by New Deal democrat The shallow industrial recession is fading in the rear view mirror A year ago the “shallow industrial recession” induced by the strong US$ and imploding oil patch was bottoming.  At that time I described the historical pattern: Typically new orders turn positive first (red, left scale in the graph below), followed by sales (green, right scale), and finally inventories (blue, right scale): At that time I concluded: If this is an incipient...

C-Span just released a ranking of US Presidents based based on a survey of historians, journalists and other scholars. Obama came in 12th. Here is the survey’s description of the process used to generate the rankings: C-SPAN’s academic advisors devised a survey in which participants used a one (“not effective”) to ten (“very effective”) scale to rate each president on ten qualities of presidential leadership: “Public Persuasion,” “Crisis Leadership,”...

by New Deal democrat Industrial production: We’re DOOO …. oh, wait, it’s the global warming hoax At first blush yesterday’s negative industrial production print gives the lie to the proposition that the economy has left last year’s “shallow industrial recession” behind, as it looks to be going mainly sideways: But a closer examination shows that is not the case.  Industrial production is broken up into three groupings: manufacturing (by far the biggest),...

by Sandwichman Recall and the General Strike The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. — Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 1940 Back in December, I posted Full Employment and the Myth of the General Strike to start the conversational ball rolling about the idea of a general strike. It was the middle post in a three-part series on full employment. Events move fast in 2017. In the past two...

CNBC carries the whole deal: [embedded content]

by Peter Dorman    (published originally at Econospeak) Why You Should Never Use a Supply and Demand Diagram for Labor Markets You would know this if you read your Cahuc, Carcillo and Zylberberg, but you probably won’t, so read this instead. A standard S&D diagram for the labor market might look like this: It’s common to use W (wage) on the price axis and N (number of workers) on the quantity axis.  Equilibrium is supposed to occur at the W where...

Consider a country with a vicious ongoing multi-sided Civil War which includes some amount of deliberate large scale civilian extermination.  You know the sort of thing: Syria today is just the most recent example, but there are other well-known examples from the last few decades.  To keep things generic, let us refer to the various sides in the Civil War as A, B, C, etc. Militias from each group have been caught massacring civilians from the other group.  Or...