Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Pluralising Anecdotes

In the grand tradition of cactus, I have arranged with Videotron for telephone, television, and internet service at our apartment in Montreal starting on Tuesday morning. If all goes well, I hope to blog about it on Tuesday. If all does not go well, I’ll be blogging it sometime after the opening ceremonies of the […]

The Company You Keep

Ah something which I actually know something about. Dana Goldstein has found an amazing fact which, if middle class parents believed it was representative, would make the world (and in particular the USA) a much better place So were the litigious Fairfax parents correct to freak out about South Lakes? Let’s look at the numbers. […]

The Employment Situation

Compared to other cycles the drop in employment this cycle looks perfectly normal, as it is right on the average of the four pre-1990 cycles. The real question is how long employment continues to fall and there was little or nothing in the recent economic data to suggest that employment is on the verge of […]

85, 662 average ytd or 38% increase for Angry Bear

by rdan Angry Bear for the year to date (seven months) has averaged about 85,662 visits a month or about a 38% increase in visits from last year. Congratulations Angry Bears and readers of all persuasions. If you like mostly what you read or contribute, and it surely is for varied reasons due to our […]

The real market incentives

by rdan Suppose I paid you for every pound of pollution you generated and punished you for every pound you reduced. You would probably spend most of your time trying to figure out how to generate more pollution. And suppose that if you generated enough pollution, I had to pay you to build a new […]

Open trade

by rdan I have noticed the term “open trade” being used by several notables on their blogs. What does it mean? There is a great reluctance to simply use the term trade, or trade agreement. I assume this is because a shorthand worked better for publication. How is this different from “free trade” or “fair […]

Return to Reagan Era

by reader ilsm Whittle a Beak: Return to Reagan Era Warfare Waste A cronie still in the acquisition business related that the DoD has gone back to using fixed price development contracts. In 1991, the Congress passed a law requiring DoD to use cost plus development contracts with its warfare welfare partners. This was required […]

Soc Sec XXXV: Monthly Trust Fund Reports

It is almost impossible to figure out whether Social Security is tracking better or worse than projected using productivity or Real GDP, for one thing the data lags and moreover is subject to revision. But there is one measure that can be tracked with precision: Trust Fund cash balances which are reported to the penny […]

Declaring losses does hardly anything??

Hat tip to James McCarthy who notes: Still no mark to market – Steve Hsu at Information Processing via Dealbreaker Mortgage– 28 July 08 Mortgage-backed assets with face value of $30.6B were just sold by Merrill for $6.7B…but, amazingly, this 80% loss on the securities only gives a kind of upper bound on their value: […]