The Angry Bear

Weekly Indicators for December 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Coincident indicators continue to ever so microscopically worsen – but not yet in recession territory; while there is an increasing suggestion from the long leading indicators that a recession could be relatively short. Provided, of course, that the Fed takes the hint. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual...

New home sales for November: at last, a bright spot! (relatively speaking) New home sales are very volatile, and heavily revised. But they frequently are the first housing metrics to turn. And November’s new home sales report suggests that they may indeed have made their low. Last month new home sales increased to 640,000 annualized, from a downwardly revised 607,000 (vs. the original 632,000) in October. Here’s what the past year looks like...

From the New York Times comes this list of trends in real estate, houses, mortgages, and the impact on buyers and sellers. The State of Real Estate Whether you’re renting, buying or selling, here’s a look at real estate trends. Rising mortgage rates. Faltering home sales. Skyrocketing rents. We spoke with economists, mortgage brokers and real estate agents to plot the course ahead. Looking for a house in this tight market? Consider...

Goodbye 117th Congress  Merry Christmas, you all. So, the 117th Congress is done, and Nancy Pelosi is ending her historic run as Speaker of the House.  It passed more legislation than we have seen happen in a congress in a very long time.  While Joe Biden did not get all he wanted, much less the progressive caucus, a great deal as passed, some of it, like the infrastructure bill, that has been languishing for decades. At the tail end we got the...

From Dan and Bill, and contributors to all our readers.

Just finished “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the making of a postwar stalemate” by Mary Sarotte. The book was recommended to me by Bruce Cochrane. It is an excellent insight into current events in Ukraine today.The title comes from the assurance given by then-Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev that German reunification would mean “not one inch eastward” in NATO expansion. This phrase has inspired much finger-pointing by Russia...

Tyler Cowen points us to YouChat, a new AI chatbot, that as far as I can see after studying this carefully for 15 seconds is supposed to be more up to date than the OpenAI bot and integrated with a search engine which naturally makes it the next new thing and presumably worth billions of dollars to potential investors. In the interest of being scrupulously fair, I decided to give YouChat a chance to answer the same question that OpenAI fumbled...

Real personal income and spending hold up (thank you, lower gas prices!) but still consistent with onset of recession This morning’s report on personal income and spending for November shows why I pay more attention to real retail sales as a forecasting tool. First, to the data: personal income increased nominally by 0.3% in November, while nominal spending increased only 0.1%. Since the deflator for the month was 0.1%, that means real income...

Durable goods orders appear to have peaked  [Note: I’ll post about personal income and spending, as well as new home sales, later.] I normally don’t pay much attention to the monthly durable goods report, but this morning’s report for November appears significant. That’s because durable goods spending has been one of the few short leading indicators to have continued to improve – until now. Here’s the long term view: New factory orders...

The new OpenAI chatbot is fun to mess around with.  (You can sign up for a free account here.)  But is it smart? I asked it an easy math question, based on Euler’s polyhedron formula.  Euler discovered that the number of edges of a polyhedron is equal to the number of faces plus the number of vertices minus 2:  E = F + V – 2.  So, for a cube, the number of faces is 6, the number of vertices or corners is 8, and the number of edges is 12, which is...