Does anyone know why coal production is falling out of bed? It is down some 40% from its August level. But coal employment is still near its’ recent peak, which implies that productivity is horrible. I suspect the problem is exports to China. Maybe someone needs to ask Trump about this.
Will China Play The Rare Earth Card In The Trade War? The rumor that China might play its “rare earth card” was the rumor today that helped push down both stock and oil markets according to a variety of reports. The trigger for this seems to have been a visit on May 26 by China’s […]
Conservative Economists Discover the Baumol Cost Disease A little over a year ago Mark Perry wrote this nonsense: The chart above (thanks to Olivier Ballou) is an update of a chart we produced last year about this time, and shows the percent changes since January 1997 in the prices of selected consumer goods and services, along with […]
Emoluments As Grounds For Impeachment I have said this before, but am saying it again. The clearest grounds for impeaching Donald Trump are not his obstruction of justice on which so much attention is being focused, but in my view his blatant and unequivocal acceptance of emoluments from foreign governments, with this most clearly evident […]
Yes, Virginia, the government shutdown really did cause a mini-recession For the past several months, I have been pounding on the idea that the government shutdown, during which 800,000 jobholders were temporarily laid off without pay, had a much bigger impact on the economy than was originally thought. This morning we get the following graph […]
San Francisco Fed: ease of finding a new job is driving improved labor force participation This is a surprising result that is worth noting: the San Francisco Fed found that the increase in prime age labor force participation in the past five years has not been due to new people being drawn into the labor […]
Dan here…the United States Library of Congress will be archiving and collecting material from Angry Bear. The overall digital archiving project began in ernest since 2013. Abbie Grotke, Lead Librarian Web Archiving Team, affirmed the process. Below are excerpts from the letter of request and the Library website. The United States Library of Congress […]
by Dale Coberly KOTLICOFF ON THE HILL with Social Security Larry Kotlikoff wrote an editorial that appeared May 14 in “The Hill:” “Social Security Just Ran a $9 Trillion Deficit and Nobody Noticed“ He cried, “Wolf! Wolf! Social Security ran a 9 Trillion Dollar Deficit last year and nobody noticed!” He went on to explain […]
Justice Stevens Shoots At Gun Decision Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, now 99 years old, has written a book, The Making of a Justice: My First 94 Years. Apparently he considers the District of Columbia versus Heller decision to be the worst of all those that was made during his time on the Supreme Court, that […]
Two Recent Studies, Children of Incarcerated Parents and the Long Run Effects of Student Debt Amid the blooming flowers of May, each year sees the arrival of the Papers and Proceedings volume of the American Economic Review, containing short and sometimes punchy gleanings from the previous ASSA meetings. Here are two abstracts of interest. I haven’t […]