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

Blast from the past for Millienials

Big tobacco companies and the medical establishments: Today, Big Tobacco is chasing a new revenue stream: e-cigarettes. They appeal to 20-somethings-and the lack of health studies about the side effects give the old merchants of death an unhealthy horizon for false advertising and profits that come at a cost of misery. And lawsuits…but not for […]

So what about Detroit? (and water)

David Zetland has a post from last year at Aguanomics that should stir some thoughts in What about Detroit.  Still relevant. I have followed Detroit’s fall with interest, mostly because I am hoping that an entrepreneurial government will allow a thousand flowers to bloom in the hollowed-out city(population has dropped by 60 percent; 200,000 properties […]

GDP and beginners

Financial Times  Has GDP outgrown its use? By David Pilling has an excellent beginners article on the make up and use of GDP that poses questions: Simon Kuznets, the Belarusian-American economist often credited with inventing GDP in the 1930s, had severe reservations about the concept right from the start. Coyle told me, “He did a […]

Labor Market Flows and Extended Unemployment Insurance II

This is my FRED graph of the day post. Recently I was almost semi convinced by the Conservative argument that recent unusually rapid growth of employment fit what they said would happen if the extended unemployment insurance program ended. Then I glanced at the data on flows from unemployment to employment and noted that there […]

The Palpable Ugliness of the Predominant Culture of the American South [updated]

Update appended. —- You may have seen this photo before. It was taken last August at the scene of a dog fighting raid, and it has been used in ASPCA advertisements all around the Internet and on TV. It can be hard to look at—a small, vulnerable puppy tied to a heavy chain, alone and […]

IMF suggests improving skills of youth & lower pay?… Keynes rolls over

Here is a video from the IMF… At the 4 minute point, the representative talks about youth unemployment in Europe and recommends two things… training to appropriate skills which would make someone more valuable. bringing down costs of employment. Oh, how wonderful!… Make your skills more valuable only to meet wage suppression. They just do […]

Fun and games with transfer pricing

ProGrowthLiberal in his comments on my last post and in his own post at EconoSpeak highlights the fact that drug-maker AbbVie already makes most of its profits outside the United States, about 87% in fact over 2011-2013 by his calculation. For PGL, then, AbbVie is not the best example of an inversion because the horse […]

More On Consumers’ Inflation Forecasts

My http://angrybearblog.strategydemo.com/2014/07/anchored-perceived-inflation-or-how-fox-news-helped-obama.html has received more attention than I would have guessed. This should be a semi-serious post on the topic. The puzzling fact is the persistently too high forecasts of next years consumer price index inflation reported in the University of Michigan Thomson Reuters Survey of Consumer Sentiment. The median forecast has consistently been over […]

Transfer pricing and inversions

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism adds an additional look at the ‘inversion’ process and rationale: Kenneth Thomas has been on this beat at Angry Bear. Here’s a short overview of how inversion deals work earlier this week,,, ,,, David Cay Johnston emailed me that there were errors in Forbes contributor Tim Worstall’s recent criticisms of […]

Example of not understanding Effective Demand

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The Economist online magazine has an article called, Jobs are not Enough, where they show a poor understanding of effective demand. “Economic growth over the business cycle is driven mostly by swings in demand, and in recent years demand has been held back: households have been repaying their debts; the government has restrained its […]