The Angry Bear

Sales lead employment: real aggregate payrolls update  – by New Deal democrat The drought in new data ends tomorrow with consumer inflation. In preparation, let’s take a look at real aggregate payrolls. These increased 0.2% in December, one of the lower readings in the past 2 years: On a YoY basis, aggregate nonsupervisory payrolls increased 5.8%, compared with consumer inflation in November, which increased 3.1%: Recall that...

Some light reading. I subscribe to it (The Atlantic) and have done so since the Civil War for a decade. Thought I would post one from The Atlantic’s News Letter (I think). Just an interesting read about something they discovered happening or maybe not-happening. People locked into something they do not like, have to stay, and when the opportunity arises, they leave. Especially if there is money to be made or less time at work or less work. What if...

USPS tells regulator, “Mind your own regulations.” Save the Post Office, Steve Hutkins The Postal Service has started off the New Year by refusing to answer important questions about its 10-year plan, Delivering for America. Earlier this week, the Postal Service told the Postal Regulatory Commission that its latest information request was outside the statutory authority of the Commission. The Postal Service has basically told the PRC to mind...

I was looking for a report through 2022 on housing. This was the best I could do. Maybe later? The report is about households with or without SS beneficiaries who are renting, homeowners with mortgages, and homeowners without mortgages. The study is looking at the cost impact in each category for those households with SS beneficiaries as compared to those households with no beneficiaries. Kind of dry; but, it gets the point across. Research...

I don’t know if kids these days still use the slang, but back in the glory days of blogging, a way to mock chicken hawks was to call them keyboard warriors or the 101st chairborn. These were people convinced they were fighting terror by advocating aggressive foreign policy in the safety of their own house (or by other insulting assumption their mother’s basement). I guess an even sillier bunch were the people who felt brave and manly while playing,...

Scenes from the jobs report 2: the unemployment rate and consumption: weak, but not recessionary  – by New Deal democrat Yesterday I looked at some employment metrics from Friday’s jobs report. Today let’s look at un- (and under-) employment. Every Thursday I repeat the mantra that jobless claims lead the unemployment rate. Here are both the U3 (blue) and U6 (red) rates from Friday’s report, compared YoY: The unemployment rate is...

Personal income, so Personal saving, ignore a huge part of Total Return — the income-from-assets measure used by every modern portfolio investor. Guess what’s missing? Personal Saving Makes More than 40% of Property Income . . . Invisible. Think Total Return, Wealth Economics, Steve Roth Matthew Klein and Joey Politano have been singularly responsible in their discussions of “excess saving” in the covid era — not least by always putting that...

Before you go on a bender claiming it is not true. It is true. Your costs of inventory and transportation are high. Three weeks on the ocean plus one week on the dock on each side of the ocean. Transportation costs and time to the buyer. Container costs this last go around were as high as $10,000. Typically they were at $4,000 or less. Are you going to have 1 – 2 weeks of safety stock or are you going to cover the ocean in-transit time. What if?...

Scenes from the leading sectors of the December jobs report: sectors of weakness and strength  – by New Deal democrat For nearly two decades, my focus on economic reporting online has been finding and examining leading indicators; those datapoints that tell us where the economy in general, and in particular jobs and income for ordinary Americans, are heading in the near future. Usually that has meant batting away DOOOOMers; those people who...

Here we are in a presidential election year, and one of the two major party candidates certain to get the nomination is still claiming the last one was stolen from him. Now, he refers to the criminals who were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison over their Jan 6 crimes as “hostages.” When did the party of “law and order” become the party that attacks the American criminal justice system?“The ongoing Republican defense of the failed coup means...