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

October employment situation: stagnant hiring, increased firing, continued wage growth

 – by New Deal democrat On a normal first Friday of the month, I would be crunching the official jobs report data to try to provide not just a coincident report on the jobs market, but also to focus on the leading indicators within that report, such as the manufacturing and construction sectors and also […]

Telling the Senate to Work Across the Aisle on Health Care Affordability

Commentary by TaxFairness Open enrollment on the Affordable Care Act Marketplace is underway. Millions of Americans are logging on to renew their health coverage and finding that the cost of their premiums has exploded since Congress has not extended the enhanced ACA premium tax credits that helped tens of millions of people afford their health […]

ACA Enrollees Can Expect Big Increases in Premium Payments  

A bit of a rewrite at Angry Bear. Lets be open here. I have listened to Senator Kennedy’s moronic opinions enough times to know much of what he says is a political attack rather than factual. Senator Kennedy makes it an issue of taking money from the budget to pass healthcare subsidies and funding higher […]

Listicle

The passing of Jim Watson, co-discoverer of DNA structure, got me thinking about the other great discoveries of the 20th century. Without consulting Google AI, I came up with these: General relativityPlate tectonicsABO histocompatibility blood typesPenicillinStructure of DNA Here’s what Google AI said: “ . . . the discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics, the […]

Reflecting Reality

If you are in management, typically you will not know everything going on in a department. You may have to ask for clarification. You don’t panic and you do have to answer a comment or a question. Trump could not answer or rebut the reporter’s easy to answer question or remark. When you do not […]

Long leading indicator Senior Loan Officer Survey for Q3 was neutral to slightly positive

– by New Deal democrat The Senior Loan Officer Survey is a long leading indicator, telling us about credit conditions that typically turn worse a year or more before the economy turns down, and improve just at the economy is ready to turn up. Fortunately, since it is reported by the Federal Reserve, it is unaffected […]

Voters Are Starting to React

Reacting to a runaway, incompetent president, and a rogue political party backing him; people decided a different path to take. This occurred in California, New Jersey, Georgia, New York, Virginia, Maine, and Colorado. Mayors and Governors were on the ballot as well lunch programs. The present, some history, and how to turn the table. “What […]

Jury rejects border patrol BS

In the annals of Trump administration whining, the outrage over a protester flinging a wrapped sandwich at a border patrol officer must surely rank as among the silliest and most childish. “Jurors showed no appetite for the Justice Department’s case against “sandwich guy,” the D.C. resident who chucked a Subway sandwich at the chest of […]

Jim Watson RIP

I see where Jim Watson, famed for the Watson-Crick double helix structure of DNA, has died. Watson was certainly very smart by conventional metrics. He entered the University of Chicago on a scholarship at 15, graduated at 19 and earned a PhD in zoology at Indiana University three years later. He and Crick published the […]

ISM services index rebounds, indicating moderate expansion, but with “stagflation”

– by New Deal democrat With the shutdown of the official government sources, along with the regional Fed indexes, the ISM manufacturing and services indexes have become especially important. To recap, because of manufacturing’s diminished importance to the general economy, the services index has become significantly more important. For forecasting purposes, I assign a 75% weight […]