The Rise of Global Innovation by US Multinationals Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, and J. Bradford Jensen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics provide an interesting discussion of the risks and opportunities from the following: Total US R&D spending as a share of GDP increased slightly from 2.5 percent in 1999 to 2.7 percent in 2016.2 Multinationals are an important driver of aggregate R&D spending in the United States.3...
Read More »Scenes from the June employment report
Scenes from the June employment report As I (and everyone else) wrote on Friday, the establishment portion of the June jobs report was very good. On closer examination, though, the leading components of the report continued to show some weakness. To begin with, for months I’ve been following manufacturing, residential construction, and temporary employment as the leading sectors. As the below graph of the past 18 months shows, all were positive in...
Read More »LONG BOND YIELDS
Everybody and their brother has an opinion about the direction of long bond yields so it should be OK for me to stick my two cents worth in. This chart of the composite of all long bond yields versus the long wave is one I published every month on the back cover of my monthly publication for over 20 years before I retired a couple of years ago. Basically, I thought of it as a good way to show that I was a long term bull on interest rates in a way that...
Read More »The New York Times: A Propaganda Machine for Trump
The New York Times: A Propaganda Machine for Trump The Times thinks it’s leading the forces of reason and light against Donald Trump, but it doesn’t have a clue. Every day their front page is festooned with the latest noxious Trumpian remark, followed by paragraphs of commentary on how unprecedented it is for a president to talk this way and how appalled most politicians and political observers are. They think Trump is making one mistake after...
Read More »Democratic Presidential Candidates Addressing Maternal Healthcare
Back in April, I finished up an article for ConsumerSafety.Org called A Woman’s Right to Safe Healthcare Outcomes. The topics covered in this as given to me by ConsumerSafety.Org were Clinical Trials, Essure, and Maternal Mortality. All of the topics dealt with women’s healthcare. Of the three issues addressed, I found Maternal Mortality to be the most compelling. I told the story of a white upper middle class couple, Lauren Bloomstein a nurse and her...
Read More »Whither The Price Of Oil?
Whither The Price Of Oil? I do not know, which is a kind of silly way to start a post, but pretty obviously this is an opening to talk about some other matters, especially the US-Iran situation. However, I want to point out some things that have been on my mind. In particular, while oil price volatility has not been super extreme recently compared to some movements in the last decade and a half, the degree of uncertainty and confusion about what is...
Read More »Supreme Court to hear cases over ACA risk-corridor funds
Supreme Court to hear cases over ACA risk-corridor funds “The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it will take up cases over whether the federal government must pay billions of dollars to health insurers that sold coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Letter to The Editor – Modern Healthcare Alert If you are going to report on this particular incident with the Cromnibus Act which passed December 11, 2014, why not give the complete history of how the...
Read More »Ali Velshi Interviews Arthur Laffer
Ali Velshi Interviews Arthur Laffer Today I endured listening to Arthur Laffer lie serially to Ali Velshi today. Skip the first 36 minutes of this Youtube as the interview begins there. Never mind the praise for Laffer’s cheerleading for Trump. Laffer actually claimed that the FED’s low interest rates after the Great Recession began was the cause of the Great Recession. OK! But then he pivots and advocates we should have low interest rates now that Trump...
Read More »“While Considering Medicare For All: Policies For Making Health Care In The United States Better”
Robert Kocher and Donald M. Berwick “While Considering Medicare For All: Policies For Making Health Care In The United States Better,” Health Affairs Dr. Donald Berwick is the former Director of Medicare and Medicaid who talked about waste in Medicare and Doctors knowing such waste exists. “It is unlikely that the United States will move quickly to a full publicly financed health insurance when Congress next considers health policy after the 2020...
Read More »US Library of Congress selects Angry Bear to archive
Dan here…the United States Library of Congress will be archiving and collecting material from Angry Bear. The overall digital archiving project began in ernest since 2013. Abbie Grotke, Lead Librarian Web Archiving Team, affirmed the process. Below are excerpts from the letter of request and the Library website. The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to...
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