by New Deal democrat Why you should be afraid: the next recession is likely to include wage deflation Beginning 3 years ago, I identified poor wage growth  as the shortfall in the economy that worries me the most. And it still worries me, even though there has been some modest improvement. Why? Because unless there […]

The much-ballyhooed announcement video offers little hint [of who, policy-wise, Clinton is].  For the first half-minute or so, you would be excused for thinking that it was some sort of detergent commercial, intended to air during the Olympics. Gay weddings! Babies being born! Moms going back to work! Clorox, this commercial seems to say, has finally gotten […]

Paul Krugman writes about GE’s announcement to get out of the finance business. Why are they getting out? Financial reform from the Dodd-Frank legislation that includes “greater oversight, higher capital and liquidity requirements, etc.” Paul Krugman says… “And sure enough, what GE is in effect saying is that if we have to compete on a […]

Slow to be getting to this, but I have to come back to such a major development. Good Jobs First, a national non-profit best known for its work on state and local subsidies to business, unveiled in March its Subsidy Tracker 3.0. This work differs from previous publications on federal subsidies by being project-based/firm-based, rather […]

Today the IMF published a short video with Christine Lagarde about avoiding the “New Mediocre”. My view is that carefully raising interest rates in the US will help raise the standard for productivity getting us eventually out of this “New Mediocre”. What do the readers of Angry Bear suggest is the answer? Leave ideas in […]

I read Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke and others. They mention two reasons why some people are calling for interest rates to rise… Possibility of Inflation Possibility of Financial instability Now I would like interest rates to rise, but I have never seen any inflation coming. In fact, it seems that inflation will stay low when […]

Brad DeLong made a case for big government and higher deficits. Paul Krugman wrote an exagerated pun of praise. The part he liked was the appeal to myopia and paternalistic proposal “The problem is that as we move into the twenty-first century, the commodities we will be producing are becoming … more subject to myopia […]

There is discourse in the econoblogosphere currently about why interest rates are low and may stay low for a long time. Larry Summers says that we may even have a negative natural real rate at full employment, even though Ben Bernanke sees that as somewhat impossible. It is fairly common knowledge that excess debt and […]