Paul Krugman writes about GE’s announcement to get out of the finance business. Why are they getting out? Financial reform from the Dodd-Frank legislation that includes “greater oversight, higher capital and liquidity requirements, etc.” Paul Krugman says… “And sure enough, what GE is in effect saying is that if we have to compete on a […]

Slow to be getting to this, but I have to come back to such a major development. Good Jobs First, a national non-profit best known for its work on state and local subsidies to business, unveiled in March its Subsidy Tracker 3.0. This work differs from previous publications on federal subsidies by being project-based/firm-based, rather […]

Today the IMF published a short video with Christine Lagarde about avoiding the “New Mediocre”. My view is that carefully raising interest rates in the US will help raise the standard for productivity getting us eventually out of this “New Mediocre”. What do the readers of Angry Bear suggest is the answer? Leave ideas in […]

I read Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke and others. They mention two reasons why some people are calling for interest rates to rise… Possibility of Inflation Possibility of Financial instability Now I would like interest rates to rise, but I have never seen any inflation coming. In fact, it seems that inflation will stay low when […]

Brad DeLong made a case for big government and higher deficits. Paul Krugman wrote an exagerated pun of praise. The part he liked was the appeal to myopia and paternalistic proposal “The problem is that as we move into the twenty-first century, the commodities we will be producing are becoming … more subject to myopia […]

There is discourse in the econoblogosphere currently about why interest rates are low and may stay low for a long time. Larry Summers says that we may even have a negative natural real rate at full employment, even though Ben Bernanke sees that as somewhat impossible. It is fairly common knowledge that excess debt and […]

I have been upset with Paul Krugman for years since he undermined the living wage movement in the 1990’s. Here is what he wrote back then… “In short, what the living wage is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality. Its advocates are basically opposed to the idea that wages are […]

by Joseph Joyce The U.S.: Inept Diplomacy, Indispensable Currency The announcements by several European governments that they would join the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) have been widely seen as indicators of the declining position of the U.S.  The AIIB had been proposed by China for the purpose of funding much-needed infrastructure projects in […]

Noam Scheiber has a hard hitting article on the front page of www.nytimes.com “2016 Candidates and Wealthy Are Aligned on Inequality” The content should be familiar to AngryBear readers. A majority of Americans are alarmed by high and increasing inequality and support government action to reduce inequality. However, none of the important 2016 candidates has […]

Via Daily Kos, we learn that Wikileaks has released the investment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is a critical chapter, as it was in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), because it establishes investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. Despite its neutral-sounding name, ISDS is actually a radical concept. Instead of using the […]