Via Bloomberg Obsession for the Perfect Worker Fading in Tight U.S. Job Market points to an issue in hiring that has been discussed here at AB: This is a problem because, at 4.1 percent last month, U.S. unemployment is at the lowest level since 2000 and companies from Dallas to Denver are struggling to find […]

I have tried to resist Fisking this op-ed by Ross Douthat, but I can’t resist. Whole post after the jump to avoid lowering AngryBear relevance index.

by Mike Kimel “Naskh” I think it was sometime in the late 90s when I first heard someone say that Reagan could never be elected to anything at the time as a Republican. This was because the Republican Party had tacked so far to the right in a decade that many who worshipped Reagan would […]

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 […]