The Angry Bear

 Weekly Indicators for April 24 – 28 at Seeking Alpha – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Several important short leading indicators rallied this week. In particular, the stock market seems to think the worst is over (for the moment!). At the same time, several important coincident indicators of taxation and employment are on the cusp of rolling over again. As usual, clicking over and reading will...

GAO: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: USPS Should Plan for Potential Workplace Charging – Save the Post Office Introduction Part of the plan as referred to in Steve Hutkins’ “EVs and S&DCs: USPS says you can’t have one without the other” was to have EV charging capabilities at the local post offices which would be available to the Post Office, USPS workers and also the public. As provided by Congress, funding was targeted for all three...

A mixed picture on real personal income, savings, and spending in March, and real total sales in February  – by New Deal democrat As I’ve indicated a number of times recently, right now I consider the report on personal income and spending co-equal to the employment report as the most important monthly data. For March, it was a mixed bag. Nominally, personal income rose 0.3%, and personal spending was unchanged. Because the applicable...

April 28, 2023, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson According to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI), legislatures in at least ten states have set out to weaken federal child labor laws. In the first three months of 2023, legislators in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota introduced bills to weaken the regulations that protect children in the workplace, and in March, Arkansas governor Sarah...

Open Thread April 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com Tags: open thread

Health Care Cost and Utilization Report, healthcostinstitute.org, April 2023 Year-over-year and 5-year cumulative trends in health care spending for individuals with employer-sponsored insurance. A detailed report by the Health Care Cost Institute covering the period 2017 – 2021 which includes the Covid pandemic. Decreases i total costs were seen during the pandemic. Still in the end, you will see pricing being the biggest factor in healthcare...

Leading components of Q1 GDP paint a mixed picture – by New Deal democrat As you probably already know, real GDP increased 1.1% at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate in Q1. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the economy improved throughout the period. The median GDP for the quarter where post WW2 recessions have begun was +2.4%, and there are reasons to believe that the reason for the positive number in Q1 was big January gains. We’ll find...

Four week average of initial claims drops below “yellow flag” level, for now  – by New Deal democrat While GDP will get the lion’s share of attention today (and I’ll post on it later on), by and large it is a look in the rear view mirror. The more forward-looking data is weekly jobless claims. This week initial claims declined -16,000 last week to 230,000. The more important 4 week average declined -4,000 to 236,000. Continuing claims, with...

I was doing some Angry Bear housecleaning and ran across this post by Barkley questioning whether trump would leave the presidency upon after his loss. This post was written by Barkley November 10th. In keeping with his requirements to wait on posting Econospeak’s commentaries, AB was to wait a day or two. Barkley had a series of posts along similar lines about trump. Of course, we all know trump did not attempt a Coup. Indeed, he incited an...

voting 217 Yes 215 no the House has passed a bill which would increase the debt ceiling, slash spending, and repeal (most of) the IRA. This ends the fun period when we could laugh at Republicans for demanding that Biden negotiate without themselves making a bargaining proposal. The bill is horrible. I am a Democrat in disarray trying to figure out how to respond (and who should respond). One possibility is to stick to the position that there...