The Angry Bear

This is a good one from Prof. Heather Cox-Richardson. It is along the lines of what I would consult in at various companies till I fixed it and was no longer needed. It is an update on what has happened in the United States. Something which has not occurred since pre-Reagan. The nations labor is being “valued” again. Peter Drucker: “Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are...

Gas and oil price update: good news and bad news We’ll get some important house price information tomorrow, but there is no economic news of significance today, so let’s update gas and oil prices. As indicated in the title, there’s good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad news first. According to GasBuddy, gas prices have not declined in over a week: They have bounced off $3.64/gallon and stabilized at $3.66-7/gallon. Which still...

Senate Democrats on a Wednesday back a while ago blocked two bills from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas). The bills would be using COVID-19 stimulus funds to bolster school security and mental health resources for students. Sounds like a much -needed idea given past circumstances. Cruz’s proposals: The Securing Our Schools Act, which was cosponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), would double the number of police officers in public, charter, and...

A Capitol rioter who received phone call from the White House on Jan. 6 was identified as a 26-year-old Trump-loving New Yorker who joked about shooting Nancy Pelosi.

Mark Hertling is one of the people I follow on Ukraine.  He is a staunch advocate for arming Ukraine, but he recently had a tweet thread defending what some see as the overly cautious and slow approach taken by the United States.  Here are some tweets from his thread: Warning: This will NOT be a popular thread. I anticipate a high degree of pushback from those who follow me. But…I thought it might be useful to provide some thoughts as to why the...

Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani at the Roosevelt Institute take a closer quantitative look at the sources of inflation the last two years: This research brief is the first to explore the size and distribution of markups (essentially the difference between sales and marginal costs) and profit margins across 3,698 firms operating in the US in 2021, reproducing and updating the analysis of Jan De Loecker, Jan Eeckhout, and Gabriel Unger’s The Rise of...

I do not have an exact date when this was written. It appears to have been update May 2021. I find it interesting as US automakers are making moves to switch from combustion powered vehicles to electrically powered vehicles utilizing rechargeable batteries to provide the power. US automaker Ford is so committed to this conversion; it has split its company into two parts. One part for combustion driven vehicles and another for battery powered...

I have two thoughts. The first is that major party presidential candidates would be wise to stop participating in big dollar fundraising events. The second is that we can identify the effect of money on political success, but usually assume that correlation is causation. I think that three major party candidates have seriously hurt themselves while raising money from rich donors. Barack Obama wishes he hadn’t said “clinging”, Mitt Romney wishes...

Weekly Indicators for September 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators column is up at Seeking Alpha. For the third week in a row, interest rates increased, and gas prices, along with the prices of other commodities, tumbled. While the decline in gas prices is good, the downturn in other commodity prices is a sign of weakening global demand. Once the decline in gas prices stops, I suspect the economic...