Lawrence Summers on Those Employee Bonuses – a Redux of the 1990’s? Lawrence Summers made an interesting comments during a CNBC interview: Former Treasury Secretary and Obama administration economic advisor Larry Summers said Friday that recent employee bonuses are stunts and not reflective of long-term hopes for prosperity that tax cuts are supposed to bring. “I […]
Angry Bear maintains its status as one of FocusEconomics Top Economics and Finance Blogs of 2018. Econospeak is on the list as well, whose authors contribute to Angry Bear. Angry Bear The Angry Bear blog is a multi-author blog that covers news, politics and economics. The contributors to the blog are some of the best […]
The Black Unemployment Rate Josh Marshall listens to Donald Trump so we do not have to: President Trump has been out bragging that “because of my policies” the African-American unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest level ever. This appears to be technically true. But I thought it made sense to give some context for the […]
Is Treasury Secretary Mnuchin Right About The Impact Of The Dollar On US Trade? Maybe yes. In Davos some days ago Treasury Secretary Mnuchin declared that a lower valued dollar would lead to a lower US trade deficit. The dollar promptly fell several percents and various persons and many observers reacted in horror, most prominently […]
Nancy Altman reminds us that Social Security is NOT off the table for Republicans via this post Republicans Are Killing Social Security One Tiny Service Cut at a Time at Slate: Republicans have made no secret of their long-standing desire to destroy Social Security as we know it. Indeed, Sen. Marco Rubio revealed just before Christmas that congressional Republicans […]
Trade was a significant factor in the weak GDP report today and as usual when this happens you see many comments that do not understand why imports are a negative in calculating GDP. We do not directly calculate GDP. Rather, we calculate consumption and adjust that for trade and inventories to obtain GDP indirectly. To […]
Parsing the Poland Problem Paradox: Local Versus National Outcomes As argued in numerous posts here, we have seen an apparently emerging disconnect between economic conditions and political outcomes in a variety of nations, with anti-immigrant or more generally nationalist or populist parties with authoritarian tendencies gaining strength in many nations despite apparently improving or even […]
A note on December existing home sales First of all, sorry for the light posting this week. There’s not much news until tomorrow and Friday, and yesterday was a travel day. So….. While existing home sales are about 90% of the entire housing market, they are the least important economically, because of their much more […]
Is Trump’s Washing Machine Tariff To Punish South Korea For Being Too Friendly With North Korea? I have seen nobody claim this, and this may simply be a matter of collateral damage, as Trump has officially approved of the recent openings related to the forthcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea, especially since South Korean President […]
Recent increased interest rates probably won’t derail housing In the last couple of weeks, long term interest rates have moved significantly higher. As of yesterday, the 10 year bond closed at roughly 2.66%, its highest yield in 3 1/2 years. If this move is sustained for a few months, I expect it to have an […]