Tag Archives: Featured Stories

Distractions,  Distractions Wow!  We have a great controversy!  A squib of a memo by the House Intel Comm has completely devoured the media.  A constitutional crisis!  Egad!  In two weeks, or maybe two months, it will be nothing.  But for now, well, very very very serious. At a minimum it has distracted everybody from Trump’s gloriously successful State of the Union speech, which was so well received until this distraction that he thinks will bring about...

Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually did to the Debt was the precisely the opposite of what he told us he was going to do. Then came Obama, whose economic policies – certainly with...

What is the GOP goal? A return to the “gilded age” (or worse) When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures–their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held all the keys to the kingdom and workers were just serfs expected to do as told and whose lives didn’t really matter much to the boss capitalists....

Corporatizatizing The All-Administrative University One of the few good things that appears to have happened in the conference committee on the generally awful impending GOP tax bill is that the hits students were going to take have been eliminated.  However, even without that additional burden, college students face costs that are far higher than any other nation and have been rising above inflation rates for decades.  While` students in Denmark...

(Dan here…lifted from an e-mail) I’m not registered with seeking alpha so I cannot read the whole article (I had sent), but what I read looks a lot like what I’ve written over the years.  Here are some statements which, working off memory, I have written posts about and which I think are supported by US macroeconomic data from the last 100 years: 1.  A tax cut generally gooses the economy in the short run (one – two years). That story is a Republican...

by Joseph Joyce Venezuela and the Next Debt Crisis The markets for the bonds of emerging markets have been rattled by developments in Venezuela. On November 13,Standard & Poor’s declared Venezuela to be in default after that country missed interest payments of $200 million on two government bonds. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had pledged to restructure and refinance his country’s $60 billion debt, but there were no concrete proposals offered at...

In Virginia, Gilespie has lost. Trump claims it is because Gilespie did not embrace him. New jersey elected a Democrat for a Governor also. In both Virginia and New Jersey these were not close races as both Democrats won by good margins of 9% and 13%. The Virginia House of Delegates picked up 14 more Democrats along with selecting the first transgender to be a in a state legislature. This would be enough Delegates to flip the House to the Democrats....

(Dan here…Biagio Bossone will be joining contributors to Angry Bear.  Here is his first post for AB concerning the impact of exchange rates) by Biagio Bossone      (Biagio BOSSONE is an Italian national,  currently advises the World Bank Group/IMF on financial sector development issues and technical assistance programs in several countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and Northern Africa and the Middle East. He is a consultant to...

   October jobs report: great utilization, decent growth, poor wages HEADLINES: +261,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate down -0.1% from 4.2% to 4.1% U6 underemployment rate down -0.3 from 8.2% to7.9% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now:  down -443,000 from 5.628 million to 5.135 million Part time for economic reasons: down -369,000...

Gimme shelter: the real cost of renting vs. homeownership What is the real cost of shelter? Over the last decade there has been lots of discussion of housing prices in isolation. Sometimes that discussion includes an inflation adjustment — which is problematic, since housing constitutes nearly 40% of the entire consumer price index, so in essence housing is being deflated largely by the cost of housing itself! From time to time there has also been a...