I have the impression that this new post by Kevin Drum is a response to objections to his earlier post made, among other places, here at angrybearblog. I get the impression that I wasn’t one of many who made the same objection. In any case it is a big improvement. Also I learned stuff I […]

Kevin Drum wrote “Here’s Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Say Much About Welfare Reform” He presents a graph of total social welfare spending in the USA divided by the number of people in households under 150% of the poverty line. He concludes “There are two obvious takeaways from this. First, overall spending on social welfare programs […]

I’m not sure if AngryBear readers noticed, but Italy is suffering a slow motion banking crisis– we are so backward that we are getting to 2008 in 2016. This post is my attempt to translate and summarize this story in Italy’s leading paper La Repubblica and an angry blog post by Luca Fantuzzi update: in […]

by Marco Fioramanti and Robert Waldmann This is the final post on European Commission decomposition of unemployment into cyclical unemployment and the NAWRU (non accelerating wage inflation rate of unemployment). This calculation is important because cyclical unemployment is used to calculate the output gap and cyclically corrected budget deficits, which are used to calculated allowed […]

A comment on Olivier Blanchard, Eugenio Cerutti, and Lawrence Summers: Inflation and Activity–Two Explorations and their Monetary Policy Implications: update: Anne in comments said it was impossible to understand what, if anything, I concluded. My conclusion is was that Blanchard, Cerutti and Summers have found striking evidence of hysteresis. They reject the null hypothesis that […]

Bernie Sanders has proposed a federal national health insurance system which will provide no-deductible no copay insurance to all US legal residents. Needless to say, this will be expensive. Amazingly, Sanders focused on what taxes he proposes be increased to pay for the program. Kevin Drum is very favorably impressed by the (relatively) honest budgeting […]

I am fairly sure it is a coincidence, but current US GDP is not disappointingly low compared to an almost incredibly crude forecast based on data from before 1990. This graph (which you have to click more to see) shows the natural log of US real GDP and a quadratic trend estimated using data from […]

Larry Summers has been writing about Secular Stagnation for Two Years. This is the post which triggered the trialogue It is an excellent and important post, but I will just take the non technical definition of Secular Stagnation The core idea behind secular stagnation was that the neutral real rate had for a variety of […]

by Marco Fioramanti and Robert Waldmann This is the second to last post on the European Commissions DG -Ec-Fin estimates of cyclical unemployment for the purposes of calculating output gaps. This estimate is called unemployment minus the NAWRU (non accelerating wage inflation rate of unemployment). We will call unemployment – NAWRU “cyclical unemployment” even though […]

usa = Greece ? A challenge. Paul Krugman asks how a country like the USA could have a Greek style crisis. In his Mundell-Fleming Lecture Krugman defined Greek style crisis twice ” a Greek-style crisis of soaring interest rates” and ” a Greek-style scenario of higher rates and a slump in the real economy” . […]