The Angry Bear

  by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 28 – March 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.  There are two big stories dominating the data. The first is how inflation, and the anticipated Fed rate hike, are affecting interest rates. The second is the ramifications, particularly for commodities, of the new Iron Curtain that has descended around Russia.  As usual, clicking over and reading should...

RJS, MarketWatch 666; January’s construction spending As usual, I estimate the impact of revisions to prior months on 4th quarter GDP, and the impact of the January report on 1st quarter GDP… Construction Spending Up 1.3% on Higher Costs in January after December and November Spending Was Revised Higher The Census Bureau’s report on January construction spending (pdf) estimated January’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would...

The Blindfolded Scaffolding Begins to Unfold We sense too little for the process of containment to unfold. Yet phenomenologists focus on early representations from the scaffolding for subsequent events in front of the now not-blindfolded infants. Infants looked at longer aspects of the psychoanalytic scaffolding: how reverie can be and is being a weird kind of blindfold.  Since our dynamical, reciprocal exchanges unfold and lead to changes —...

Fascist Traditionalism And Putin’s Invasion Of Ukraine  About a half-century ago I was urged by my oldest friend to read a book by Fritjof Schuon (1907-1998) written in 1953, The Transcendental Unity of Religions. The book’s title basically tells its message: that while each religion has its own exoteric forms that differ from those of each other, there is a core to all of them that is the same, a transcendental unity of cosmic truth and...

Vladimir who daren’t dismount III. Estragon is french for sunflower. How in the hell, Samuel? These days, fossils are paying good money for carbon capture stories. More for the hacks. Lord knows we’ve them aplenty. The €13 billion-plus overruns Nord Stream in a time of global warming was silly. The commitment to fossils, sillier. Being dependent on Russia, was stupid. Nord Stream II was doubling down on silly and stupid. Enough Carpe Diem. Too...

“March 5, 2022,” Letters from an American, Professor Heather Cox – Richardson Whenever something good is going down, there are nut jobs popping up making demeaning statements about what is occurring. Here is one of Trump’s acolytes taking a shot at Ukraine’s Zelensky’s courage. “Yesterday, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) referred to the “Putin wing” of the Republican Party when she shared a video clip of Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor was...

February jobs report: a Big Win!, NDd There were two main trends I was looking for in this jobs report:  1. Is the pace of job growth beginning to decelerate?  2. Is wage growth holding up? Is it accelerating? The answers were: 1. The 6-month average of monthly gains, which was running at 548,000 in the 2nd half of 2021, increased in February to 582,000. 2. Wage growth, which averaged 5.9% in the 2nd half of 2021, is now up 6.7%...

The cleric Th. Chalmers, in the otherwise in many respects ridiculous and repulsive work… has correctly struck upon this point, ‘Profit,’ says the same Chalmers, ‘has the effect of attaching the services of the disposable population to other masters, besides the mere landed proprietors, . . . while their expenditure reaches higher than the necessaries of life.’ The above quote is not the point Marx considered correct in Chalmers’s “otherwise…...

Continuing claims continue near 50 year lows as the Omicron tsunami continues to recede, NDd [Programming note: Hopefully I’ll put up a coronavirus update later today.]Initial claims (blue) declined 18,000 to 215,000 (vs. the pandemic low of 188,000 on December 4). The 4 week average (red) declined 6,000 to 230,500 (vs. the pandemic low of 199,750 on December 25). Continuing claims (gold, right scale) increased 2,000 to 1,476,000, (vs....

Monetary Sovereignty, Sanctions and Russian Economic Policy The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to the center stage if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial...