The Angry Bear

Introduction: Before I get started on the main text of Kip’s expert article, I wish to point out something which is happening nationally. There is a plan afoot of forcing people into Value-Based Payment plans from traditional Medicare. The players include Iora Health (subsidiary of One Medical), Privia, General Catalyst, agilon health, Caravan Health, Signify (CVS owned), Village MD (Walgreens owned), Premier, etc. This is being done in...

Another week of good news on jobless claims  – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims had been in an almost relentless uptrend from the end of March through early August. Since then, they have completely reversed. This week initial claims declined another -6,000 to 222,000, and the 4 week average declined -7,500 to 233,000. Continuing claims, which lag somewhat, increased another 36,000 to 1,473,000, a 5 month high: There was a...

Another moment in History. “Remembering Queen Elizabeth II, Who Died at 96″ | The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead. Informational . . . Queen Elizabeth II, died on Thursday at Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at the age of ninety-six. She became monarch in the early hours of February 6, 1952. Famously, she remained unaware of her transmutation for several hours until told. King George VI died in his sleep at the Sandringham estate, in Norfolk, as Elizabeth,...

“Coronavirus dashboard for September 7: the slow ebbing on the way to endemicity continues” I promised a COVID update, so I suppose I ought to follow through. Let’s start today with a graph of South Africa’s cases and deaths for the past year: South Africa is where BA.1 and BA.4&5 originated. You can see the huge spike in cases last December from original Omicron, and the smaller spike this June from BA.4&5. And yet deaths never...

Mary Jacob explaining the student loan she paid off. This is a loan which had high balances due to miscalculations, etc. If I felt up to it, I could probably figure out how she ended up paying $16,000 in the end. It appears she was paying interest only in the beginning, drove the loan down by 50% when she doubled up on payments My final attempt to help those that don’t understand the student loan game.Mortgage: At closing, you know exactly what...

The average age of the American farmer has been stuck at 57.5 since 2017 and hasn’t seemed to budged into 2021 despite an explosion of new farmer operators choosing to quit their pandemic day jobs and head for the fields to participate in small plot farming and local market vending. Generationally, the unfortunate circumstance with an aging farmer population and high land values equates to what Agricultural Economics Professor Dr. Shannon Ferrell of...

by Joseph Joyce China and the Debt Crisis Sri Lanka is not the first developing economy to default on its foreign debt, and certainly won’t be the last. The Economist has identified 53 countries as most vulnerable to a combination of “heavy debt burdens, slowing global growth and tightening financial conditions.” The response of China to what will be a rolling series of restructurings and write-downs will reveal much about its position in the...

As usual, what I found in My In-Box. Things I would like to write, have barely enough time to read, and pass them on to AB readers. Nothing here on the present battle between the DoJ and a neophyte Federal judge who lacks broad based experience as a federal prosecutor and in civil trials. I had an article, read it, and did not realize what I had read and who it applied to at the time. Then the storm hit. The text as written by an attorney who...

I told you so Not much economic news this week. I’ll post an update on COVID later, but for now, a follow-up on my Mar A Lago search warrant post last week. Last week I concluded my observations as follows: “Despite how devastating the DoJ response apparently is, it is important to remember that this judge, on Friday [actually Saturday, sorry], publicly declared that she had made up her mind on an issue before the other party had an...