The Angry Bear

by New Deal democrat Two hits and a miss on GDP and wages We got two pieces of good news from the GDP report this morning, and one piece of bad news for workers. First, from the important long leading housing sector, real private fixed residential investment rose again to a new post-recession high: This adds to the generally positive data coming out of that sector. Second, proprietors income increased: This is a good proxy for corporate profits, which won’t...

I use an ad blocker in general, and add exceptions if ads are not onerous and I want to subscribe to help fund sources. The impact on AB is not large but helps keep AB on a non-profit level instead of using personal funds. Contributors are volunteers. But I would like to hear from readers on notions on their own experience…AB is glad to share links to content almost anywhere. Via VOX: The impact of ad blockers on the Internet In the short run – before sites...

Via Vox: One size does not fit all: On the heterogeneous impact of free trade agreements Can empirical research on past FTAs shed light on this uncertainty? To date, most studies that quantify the effects of trade agreements have either focused on obtaining a common average effect across all agreements (e.g. Baier and Bergstrand 2007, Anderson and Yotov 2016) or have assumed that the effects are common across similar types of agreements (e.g. Baier et al....

by Barkley Rosser Financial Times Messes Up On Italy I have for a long time thought the Financial Times to be the best newspaper in the world, but now I am going to play Dean Baker beating the press on it.  I think they are slipping, and the sign is a story that appeared in today’s issue about Matteo Renzi in Italy, about whom I have posted here previously. The story reported that he is likely to finally nail down the leadership of the Democratic Party in...

by Kenneth Thomas European Union ends relocation subsidies This isn’t actually news, but it’s news to me, and it’s something you need to know. Greg LeRoy sent me an article by James Meek in London Review of Books (20 April 2017) that he’d been sent by a friend, documenting more EU-permitted job piracy by Poland that preceded the case I discuss at length in my book, Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital. There, I criticized the European...

Linda Greenhouse of the NYT comments: A Supreme Court quiz: Who offered this paean to judicial restraint: “If it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in my view it is necessary not to decide more to a case”? … That was nearly 11 years ago, only eight months into his tenure. It was before Citizens United erased limits on corporate spending in politics, before Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, before Chief Justice Roberts...

by Barkley Rosser Poland: “What Are These People Complaining About?” Thus spake Jeffrey Sachs in January 1994 at the ASSA/AEA meetings shortly after the Solidarity government of Lech Walesa was defeated in an election over plans to cut old age pensions, which Sachs thought were too high. He has since recanted some of his views from that time, but indeed Poland had been the poster boy for the Washington Consensus on transition, with its “shock therapy”...

by Sandwichman Gibberish Repeat after me: The world is not a zero-sum game. Technology often creates more jobs than it destroys. The number of jobs in the economy depends on how much people are spending and investing. High-skilled tech workers grow the economic pie by boosting productivity, encouraging more investment and increasing entrepreneurship. Economists call this “the lump of labor” fallacy. Jennifer Rubin, WaPo Trump and right-wingers who have never...

After being confronted by TPM reporter Alice Ollstein about the exemption for Washington elected officials and their staff, it was obvious they were caught off guard. Read some of the answers dancing around the issue. New Jersey Republican Representative Tom MacArthur who proposed an amendment allowing states to opt out of key PPACA requirements. Read what he and other Republican House Representatives had to say when they were asked about the exempt to the...