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

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 […]

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: […]

Defining incentives

Hat tip to Mark Thoma link to Economistmom for this link to a WaPO column in the Human Behavior section by Shankar Vedantam. Psychologists have long been interested in what happens when people’s internal drives are replaced by external motivations. A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they […]

Tribal Economy

by reader Laurie Tribal Economy There has been references on AngryBear to economic structures, workforce participation and economic justice among tribal/village residents in the past. Informed readers may know that Marx and Engels repeatedly cited Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Societies; another of Morgan’s publications is League of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). My mother has previously published […]

Final collapse of WTO Doha talks

The Center for Economic Policy and Research reports that: Despite trade ministers’ hopes for a last-minute deal, World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations collapsed yet again today, and observers at the talks in Geneva say that the failure is not surprising, given the reluctance of India and other developing nations to sacrifice food security measures in […]

The right stuff…who has it?

ataxingmatter ends an essay on oil money and our philosphy of money with: …yet talk about understanding ordinary Americans because they didn’t grow up rich and in which the have-nots suffer from the results of a focus on growth but not opportunity, wealth but not shared well-being. Anyone hear the words opportunity or well-being this […]

Monetary Policy and Economic Shocks

OSO writes from down under: Monetary Policy and Economic Shocks: Poor Ben Bernanke. You gotta feel for the poor guy. Faced with a whole bunch of economic problems all occurring at once he took the only option that seemed to be open to him – which was to create more money and postpone the inevitable. […]