“About 90 minutes before the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Monday the cuts in payments to healthcare givers of badly injured motorists don’t apply to those injured before June 2019, one of those survivors died in a Farmington Hills hospital following a two-year struggle to maintain his quality of life and health. Sixty-four year old Brian Woodward spent the past 24 months of his life being shuffled between three nursing facilities and 22 hospital...

Another dumb, ignorant move by 1 of the 3 rating agencies.

Manufacturing and construction give very mixed signals to start Second Half 2023 data  – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month’s data started out with the ISM manufacturing report for last month, and construction spending for the month before last. Additionally, I am going to take a look at motor vehicle production, because I think it is unusually important right now. Manufacturing contracted for about the 10th month in a row in July,...

Manufacturing and construction give very mixed signals to start Second Half 2023 data  – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month’s data started out with the ISM manufacturing report for last month, and construction spending for the month before last. Additionally, I am going to take a look at motor vehicle production, because I think it is unusually important right now. Manufacturing contracted for about the 10th month in a row in July,...

from Peter Radford This is how I explain what has happened to myself. Nobody should begin without warning.  So we ought jot down some initial observations that provide a starting point for what follows.  Some will become highly relevant.  Others will fade as we dig deeper into our subject and discover that they were not germane to the main theme.  They are in no particular order, since imposing order suggests a level of understanding unjustified by experience.  We simply do not know what...

I have been running into the ongoing debates on nominal GDP targeting, and whether it is superior to inflation targeting. To look at this debate, I need to put my “conventional economist” hat on, as if one accepts the heterodox view that interest rate policy is ineffective, the entire debate is pointless (neither policy “works”). As will become apparent, I think the neoclassical models behind the debate are dubious. But if we accept that interest rates at least sort-of work the way that they...

This is another example of Engels explaining the theory of historical materialism. I know of this letter from Mills and Goldstick (1989). They also point out this letter from Engels. Here we see the metaphor of ideas "standing on their head", not in relation to Hegel's idealism, but as real economic relations reflected in finance. I like the emphasis on the interdependence of industries that could be expressed in Leontief matrices. Does this letter express a deterministic, strict dependence...

AB: This a good coverage on healthcare in the US as compared to other countries. It is long. It also has many charts and graphs rather than words. This is why I posted this at Angry Bear. It is easy to grasp the implications. U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022, Commonwealth Fund, Munira Z. Gunja, Evan D. Gumas, Reginald D. Williams II Introduction In the previous edition of U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, we...

AB: This a good coverage on healthcare in the US as compared to other countries. It is long. It also has many charts and graphs rather than words. This is why I posted this at Angry Bear. It is easy to grasp the implications. U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022, Commonwealth Fund, Munira Z. Gunja, Evan D. Gumas, Reginald D. Williams II Introduction In the previous edition of U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, we...

A recent discussion thread concerning the “lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 reminded me of another conspiracy theory involving claims of a bioweapon that also probably had a natural origin.The US government claimed that the Soviet Union was using trichothecene mycotoxins as biological weapons in Southeast Asia in the mid-1970s. In support of this, they pointed to the finding of mycotoxin on leaves and in the blood of people who...