The Angry Bear

As always, I must start by saying I have no expertise and there is no reason anyone should be particularly interested in my thoughts. The question is how will the war in Ukraine end. I guess I have a guess, but it implies it will last a long time. I can think of 3 possibilities, Russian victory, Ukrainian victory or a negotiated peace. First, I think it won’t end with Russian victory. Given recent Ukrainian battlefield victories, this...

Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital! In his 1965 farewell lecture at Brandeis University, Herbert Marcuse read a long passage from the Grundrisse’s “fragment on machines” and then observed: “But Marx himself has repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!” In Time, Labor and Social Domination, published 28 years later, Moishe Postone addressed the same section from the Grundrisse and...

Positive real retail sales in August, but YoY flatness continues  – by New Deal democrat Retail sales, probably my favorite monthly economic datapoint, increased 0.3% in August. Since consumer prices rose 0.1%, real retail sales rose 0.2%: That’s certainly good news. Now here’s the bad news: July’s retail sales were revised downward by -0.4%, so that real retail sales, reported last month as +0.1%, are now shown down by a little less than...

I have been following New Deal democrat for a long time now. What NDd is reporting in this post is a big deal going into November’s Elections. In spite of all the negativism being reported by political interests, the economy is still moving forward. People are still working. I keep having to remind people about what 2008 was about. The last two years could have been far worse. run75441 Improvement in initial jobless claims continues  – by...

How To Dismantle An Empire  My late mother seriously admired the now late Queen Elizabeth II. Not only was she a conservative Anglophiliac with overwhelming British ancestry (all the “nations” of the UK) who had tea in the afternoon at the proper British time in more or less the proper British way, there was also the matter that the queen bore a son her heir only seven months after my mother had me. I was raised to see Charles as a   a sort of...

With the Breaking Into series we will explore US agriculture, the least complex, the most complex, the failures, frustrations, sustainability, costs, and future of each topic that makes up modern agricutlure. On this episode we are going to explore a more complex, yet still small, system of farming for profit, Small Plot Farming. Small Plot Farming in a name can seem inadequate, small, not useful in the bigger picture of global agribusiness, but...

PPI, without the lagging phantom of Owners Equivalent Rent, declines in August, decelerates YoY  – by New Deal democrat What a difference it makes that PPI does not have a concept like “owners equivalent rent!” Overall PPI declined by -0.1%, following a -0.4% reading in July, together the two lowest readings since the pandemic lockdown months: Core PPI increased by 0.5% (blue in the graph below), which while historically high, was the...

A lot of informational news deposited in my In-Box this week. Nothing this week is taken from anywhere else. I think last week, I included one news article from the outside. Political, Economic, Healthcare news are my mainstays. The usual economics and business news coming from different sources. Yes, inflation is still an issue. I do not believe Powell will not give us a soft landing he thinks he is capable of doing. One issue will help...

Housing: permits and average starts decline, while construction remains at peak The data on housing construction this month was mixed. While starts rose, their 3 month average, at 1.511 million annualized, was the lowest since September through November 2020. Meanwhile total and single family permits both declined, both to the lowest since June 2020: This year I’ve also been looking at the record number of housing units that had permits, but...