The Angry Bear

I just finished reading “Saving Ryan” by Emil Kakkis. Kakkis is a physician who pioneered enzyme replacement therapy for Mucopolysaccharidosis I (MPS I), a progressive and fatal disease. The story is about the patients and their families who struggle with the disease and Emil’s struggle to deliver life-enhancing therapy against terribly long odds. The Ryan of the book’s title is a kid with MPS I. His working class parents were not content to watch...

House price indexes decline, unchanged in October; further evidence of real declines since summer The Case Shiller national house price index declined another -0.3% in November, and is now up 9.2% YoY, compared with a peak of +20.8% YoY in March (note that is in line with my rule of thumb that a decline of 1/2 or more in YoY growth over the past 12 months indicates a series has peaked and rolled over). The FHFA purchase only house price index...

Open thread Dec. 23, 2022, Angry Bear, angry bear blog Tags: open thread

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...