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

Healthcare reform op-ed

The current uptick in ‘medical inflation’ in private sector health industry is worth a separate post. The Standard and Poor Healthcare Economic Indices can be found here. Lifted from a note from Run 75441 on the link I sent on healthcare reform. Recently, Matt Stoller claimed Obama had a 61 vote majority in the Senate and […]

From Dan on migration to Word press

Hi folks.  I have finally initiated the process to migrate to a word press platform from the blogger platform, and will be switching to another comment system to be determined.  Blogger is getting harder to use in our experience, and of course did not develop the variety of tools to augment how Angry Bear can […]

Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney?

Barkley Rosser reports from the world ecology conference in Rio,  Michael Klare offers a a comprehensive overview of US international political policy regarding energy. (hat tip Spencer) By Michael T. Klare,Tom Dispatch re-posted with permission from the author Is Barack Obama Morphing Into Dick Cheney? Four Ways the President Is Pursuing Cheney’s Geopolitics of Global […]

Confidence Indicators Deteriorated Significantly This Week

by Rebecca Wilder Confidence Indicators Deteriorated Significantly This Week This week national confidence surveys rolled in with just one story: the economic infection in Europe is spreading. Business confidence indicators in France and Germany declined 1.1% and 1.6%, respectively, in the month of June. In Italy consumer confidence hit another record low since 1996 of 85.3 after […]

Substantively misleading reporting on winners in oil manipulations

Yves Smith writes to blast more ‘reporting’. I also follow Angry Bear Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts whom Mark Thoma has recently been linking, who has a unique style for his thoughts, on ‘ballance’ in reporting. It isn’t until paragraph 14, when cursory readers have already checked out, that we get a mention of who really wins […]

Exchange rate pegs getting a new look?

This article at Voxeu reminded me that exchange rate pegs might come back in vogue. Voxeu has an article on the “trilemma” of ’emerging’ economies: Do sterilised interventions allow countries a way around the fundamental trilemma of international finance by providing them with a means of systematically affecting exchange rates independent of their monetary policies? […]

Report From Rio…Barkley Rosser

by Barkley Rosserre-posted from Econospeak with the authors permission Will A Thousand CEOs Save The Planet? Report From Rio Just back from presenting paper at International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) conference in Rio that preceded the main UN Sustainable Development conference that has started today there, the Rio + 20 show.  What is going […]

Lying Liars: The Winner Is…

Or: Chris Mooney Should Really Learn to Use Graphics More He’s got a great piece (“Reality Bites Republicans“) up over at The Nation on the rise of fact checkers, the perception that they’re bend-over-backward (or forward…) “even handed” in the face of blatant falsehood asymmetry, and long-term analysis of results from PolitiFact. But he also […]

Should the Fed Buy Munis?

Mike Konczal floats a very interesting idea emailed to him by Richard Clayton, the Research Director of Change To Win (my bold for quick scanning). under Section 14 b 1 the Fed has the authority to purchase any obligation of a state or local government of 6 months maturity or less. This provision seems clearly […]