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Coming Attractions: A Trump charging decision

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/08/coming-attractions-a-trump-charging-decision/
Created
Mon, 09/01/2023 - 01:00
News overlooked on Friday This news was largely obscured Friday by the Republicans’ Speaker follies: The special counsel investigating Donald Trump could decide whether to file criminal charges against him in just weeks after amassing a trove of new state documents concerning pressure to overturn the 2020 election, sources have told Bloomberg. Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states. “You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden. “Moving quickly” is good.

Econometric testing

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2023/01/08/econometric-testing-2/
Created
Mon, 09/01/2023 - 00:09
Debating econometrics and its shortcomings yours truly often gets the response from econometricians that “ok, maybe econometrics isn’t perfect, but you have to admit that it is a great technique for empirical testing of economic hypotheses.” But is econometrics — really — such a great testing instrument? Econometrics is supposed to be able to test […]

Chaotic speaker vote two years after attempted coup in oil-rich North American country

https://rys.io/en/163.html
Created
Sun, 08/01/2023 - 12:18

This week in the United States of America, a former British colony on the North American continent, long-brewing political and social problems culminated in a messy speaker election in the lower chamber of the bicameral national parliament.

The Republican party, by far the more conservative of the two major parties in what effectively is a two-party political oligopoly, gained narrow majority in the chamber in November elections, but was unable to effectively execute on its new-found power. A small far-right splinter group within the party blocked the election of the speaker — a procedural position that has gradually become heavily politicized — demanding political favors in return for their votes. This resulted in four days of heated and often chaotic proceedings, at one point devolving into a brawl.

And now for a little good news

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/07/and-now-for-a-little-good-news/
Created
Sun, 08/01/2023 - 10:30
Inflation is on the run Not that this has penetrated the news media which just today was running scare stories about the price of eggs. But it’s real. This is from economist Alan Blinder: Maybe we should start the new year with some good news: Inflation has fallen dramatically. No, that’s not a prediction; it’s a fact. With one month remaining in 2022 (in terms of available data), inflation in the second half of the year has run vastly lower than in the first half. In fact—and this is astonishing—it’s almost back down to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Even more astonishing, hardly anyone seems to have noticed. Yes, there’s a catch or two or three, to which I’ll come back. But first the good news: Over the past five months (June to November 2022), inflation has slowed to a crawl. Whether measured by the consumer-price index, or CPI, which most people watch, or the price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, which the Federal Reserve prefers, the annualized inflation rate has been around 2.5% over these five months. Yes, you read that right.