Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

San Francisco Fed: ease of finding a new job is driving improved labor force participation This is a surprising result that is worth noting: the San Francisco Fed found that the increase in prime age labor force participation in the past five years has not been due to new people being drawn into the labor force, but rather by a very large decrease in people leaving it: [Note: keep in mind that prior to the early 1990s, both inflows and outflows are...

A comment about the economy and the 2020 election Recently I’ve seen a bunch of takes to the effect that “the economy is doing great, and therefore it is likely that Donald Trump will be re-elected.” In my opinion that fear is overblown for three important reasons. The first, least noteworthy reason, is that there is still a lot of time between now and the election. As I noted Monday, many – but not all – models of the economy indicate that a recession...

Twelve Big Picture bullet points on the economy It’s a really slow week for economic data. Really the only important report is new home sales, which will be released Thursday. I’ve been working on a few things, but they are really information-dense and time-consuming to organize, and because they deal with how long leading indicators interact with one another, I’ll probably post them on Seeking Alpha. So in the meantime, let me give you a few hopefully...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The stock market’s “tariff tantrum” is driving down interest rates in bonds. We are in a time when government policy decisions – sometimes just passing tweets – are driving winners and losers in economic activity. And these can have immediate impact, disrupting the scheme of long leading -> short leading -> coincident indicators...

Sanctions On Iran Are Hitting Hezbollah That is the top headline, upper right corner front page, of today’s Washington Post, a quite long article by Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamous.  WaPo has been much criticized by Trump and his supporters for alleged “fake news” critical of his leaving the Iran nuclear deal while Iran was compliant and not only reimposing the sanctions put on by Obama to get Iran to the negotiating table for that deal, but adding more and...

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...

TDS vs ODS vs BDS This is motivated by running on in the econoblogosphere to Trump supporters who when confronted with hard facts they cannot refute revert to name calling that those stating actual facts are suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS).  I have recently seen it thrown out “liberally.”  What is going on here? The beginning of this odd label dates to the George W. Bush era, specifically 2003 when the late Charles Krauthammer, a...

Consumer credit: both producer and consumer sides of the ledger show mortgage market OK, increasing stress for other loans The New York Fed reported on household debt and credit. The good news is that there has been no increase in total delinquencies: This is important because the amount of delinquencies would be expected to increase if we were close to getting into a recession. The somewhat more bad news is that, if the *amount* of delinquencies has...

by Joseph Joyce The Exorbitant Privilege in a World of Low Interest Rates The U.S. dollar has long enjoyed what French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called an “exorbitant privilege.”  The U.S. can finance its current account deficits and acquisition of foreign assets by issuing Treasury securities that are held by foreign central banks as reserves. The dollar’s share of foreign reserves, while falling, remains over 60%.  But in a world of low...

Who Needs Critical Thinking? Apparently not the US military. “Critical thinking” has long been a buzz phrase of US higher education.  There was a time when I could not hear a speech by a higher administrative person at my or other higher ed institutions that did not tout critical thinking as a really important goal of higher ed.  We were all supposed to be teaching it all the time.  I got a bit tired of these incessant speeches, but in fact I agreed with...