Tag Archives: Featured Stories

[unable to retrieve full-text content]– by New Deal democrat One of the well-established long leading indicators is corporate profits. Typically they peak a year or more before the onset of a recession. And the reason makes sense: if there is profit pressure that lasts longer than a single quarter, i.e., it looks like it may be forming a trend, […] The post Are corporate profits stalling in Q3? appeared first on Angry Bear.

[unable to retrieve full-text content]I am canvassing near Pittsburgh this week with a group of around 30.  The first few days have been relatively uneventful.  The weather has been beautiful.  A few of my co-canvassers reported useful conversations, like one woman who wanted to vote but wasn’t sure who the pro-choice candidate was.  I have had one conversation with […] The post Pennsylvania canvassing report appeared first on Angry Bear.

Kevin Drum has a post up about the present and future of EV charging stalls in the US. As of 2023, the number was 184,000, with public charging stalls outnumbering Tesla stalls 6:1. Is that a lot or a little? Well, lots of people say that they’re holding off buying EVs because of the range, which is still less than most ICE cars. One way to mitigate that concern is to have more charging stalls than gas station nozzles*. So how many gasoline...

if long-term interest rate r is less than the trend growth rate of GDP g Yesterday (technically very early today) I promised a post on why long-term Treasury interest rates are very important. In particular it is very important if the long-term interest rate r is less than the trend growth rate of GDP g. If r<g then the public sector intertemporal budget constraint is not binding. This means that public policy is not even Pareto efficient. In...

Farming is a risky business. Always has been. A federal program to keep farmers in business during droughts seems like a good idea to me. Sadly, it’s also a target for fraud:“On a normal day, the promising storms produced snow or rain that would fall onto a system of official weather stations at airstrips or town halls, into heated “tipping buckets.” When the teeter-totter buckets filled with a thimbleful of water, the seesaw tilted, dropping one...

Suppose that you wake up tomorrow and discover that a sadistic alien has turned you into an economist.  You are just getting over your shock at your new predicament (“How will I make friends?  Will anyone ever trust me again?  At least I’m not a lawyer.”) when Kamala Harris, responding to voter concerns about inflation, makes a vague statement in favor of government restrictions on the price of groceries.  It just so happens that you have a...

This is actually related to my day job. For some decades I have been puzzled by two of Kahneman and Tversky’s discoveries (reported very well in this excellent book). First, there is the excessive reliance on diagnostic characteristics (called diagnostic expectations by economists). A classic example is the room with 90 lawyers and 10 engineers. Jim is quiet and hardworking and likes model trains. It is human nature to conclude he is an engineer...

The false dichotomy of climate change remediationYears ago, I had a Facebook friend from my hometown who was a big enthusiast of molten salt nuclear reactor technology. He wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but his dad had worked on MSRs in the ‘60s, and he fetishized his dad’s memory. As some point, I mentioned that we had installed rooftop solar on our house, and he began attacking me. Rather than see MSRs and solar as two parallel paths towards...

I am late to the discussion of the (possible) US soft landing. I think I better write about the soft landing (so far) in case it is ceasing to be soft (I am not making a forecast). The remarkable thing is that the dramatic increase in the Federal Funds Rate did not induce a downturn let alone a recession The way interest rates affect GDP is principally residential investment and exchange rates. Other monetary authorities also raised rates in...

by Joseph Joyce Capital Ebbs and Flows The Republican nomination of Donald Trump as its nominee for President ensures that international trade will be a major issue in the campaign. Trump views trade as a zero-sum game and the existence of U.S. trade deficits as proof that other nations have taken advantage of U.S. openness (= weakness). Tariffs are the primary policy tool to respond to the unfair treatment of U.S.-made goods and even the...