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

Re: Tim Duy… Brains need not explode

Tim Duy, who is a cool economist, points out a difference between the labor market and output GDP… Labor market improving while GDP is slowing. He describes this difference for the Fed. “Now they have slow GDP growth and fast employment growth. That will make brains explode on Constitution Ave.” Yet, Brains need not explode. […]

Habemus Bad Bank

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 […]

Recession Mania

January 17, 2016 Marcus Nunes posted on the views of a possible Recession The “Plunging Economy.” Marcus asks the Question; What to make of these trends? Do they justify the “recession mania” that is taking shape? The Fed believes otherwise about the possibility of recession and clings to the only thing not plunging.

NAWRU VI Arbitrary Restrictions on Paramaters

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 […]

How Strong is the Blanchard, Cerutti and Summers Evidence for Hysteresis ?

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 […]

Now Noah Smith raises the Zombies to put them down

Noah Smith posted an article about Zombie companies in Japan. He recognizes that creative destruction must take place. Zombies must die. So bail outs of inefficient businesses must stop. “Japan’s cycle of bailouts must end.” Noah Smith, January 20, 2016 I agree and have written in the past about the Zombie companies weighing down advanced […]

Clinton’s Bizarre Attack on Her Husband’s 1992 Credentials to Be Elected Commander in Chief

The Clinton campaign is set to air this new, minute-long ad in Iowa and New Hampshire that has the feel of a closing argument: [picture from ad of a very solemn-faced Secretary of State Clinton standing next to Obama at the funeral of a fallen soldier or marine, and a link to the ad.] — […]

Recession or Resetion?

I wrote last summer that the Dow would not rise much above 17,300 and then eventually drop from that level into a recession. We see markets dropping now, but are they dropping into a recession or a resetion? What is a resetion? That is when the markets “reset”. Stock values have been high so at […]

The little problem with Clinton’s message that Krugman doesn’t mention in his critique of Clinton and Sanders today: Her incessant claim that only taxes bears negatively against “incomes”. [Edited and typo-corrected. 1/20 at 11:34 a.m. Addendum added 1/20 at 11:50 a.m.]

[T]there are serious questions about how we’re going to pay for what we want to see our country do. And, I’m the only candidate standing here tonight who has said I will not raise taxes on the middle class. I want to raise incomes, not taxes, and I’m going to do everything I can to […]