March jobs report: surprisingly weak HEADLINES: +103,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate fell -0.2% from 8.2% to 8.0% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: fell -35,000 from 5.131 million to 5.096 […]
Kudlow’s Trade Coalition of the Willing Who knew when I posted this: We could go back to 2002 and how the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 was sold to people like Senator John Kerry and Senator Hillary Clinton. The Bush-Cheney White House sold this as a means to encourage Iraq […]
Paul Krugman has been wondering why stock market indices fell so sharply soon after Trump began trade-war-mongering. (also less wonkily here) He starts by noting that it’s a mugs game to try to explain stock market fluctuations, but then tries all the same. The puzzle is that according to the very standard Heckscher Ohlin Samuelson […]
From time to time, Angry Bear has featured Steve Hutkins, (Save The Post Office Blog) and Mark Jamison’s (retired NC Postmaster) commentary on the efforts of various political and commercial interests to close down the United States Postal Service and give it over to the likes of UPS, FedX, and other commercial enterprises. Most recently, […]
This essay is excellent. Just click the link. Kai Stinchcombe argues “blockchain is a … technology, not a metaphor” here’s what blockchain-the-technology is: “Let’s create a very long sequence of small files — each one containing a hash of the previous file, some new data, and the answer to a difficult math problem — and divide up some money […]
Are We in a Trade War? President Trump sent two of his minions out yesterday to lie about this question. Kudlow: We are not in a trade war. What this is is an attempt to right some of the wrongs with respect to China. Our Treasury Secretary said essentially the same thing: Our objective is still not to […]
Trump and his administration love to brag about the number of jobs created since he became president. But the only reason he gets away with claiming that a record number of jobs have been created since he took office is the poor job the press does reporting economic data. It only takes a quick glance […]
Trump’s Trade War, Stranded Assets, and Wilbur Ross’s Shipping Company Paul Krugman relates declines in stock valuations to the insanity of trade policy from Donald Trump and taught me a new expression – stranded asset: An asset that is worth less on the market than it is on a balance sheet due to the fact that it […]
Evergreen Looks in the Mirror and Says It’s OK The “Independent” External Review Panel on The Evergreen State College Response to the Spring 2017 Campus Events (quotes not in the original) just released its report, and it says that everything campus administration has done in connection with this episode and everything it is now doing in […]