The Angry Bear

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Weekly Indicators for July 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The 10-2 year Treasury yield inverted again, with very little fanfare. And several other leading indicators deteriorated a little further as well. But as the jobs report showed, the nowcast is still positive. As usual, clicking over […] The post Weekly Indicators for July 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha appeared first on Angry Bear.

(Dan here…lifted from comments) Barkley Rosser writes: There are two things Trump did that added to inflation that Biden has somehow not undone yet. One of them is reversing the Trump tariffs, which he clearly fears doing because of opposition by Organized Labor and many white working-class voters in the crucial Rust Belt states. Some of them even support tariffs that hurt them personally, such as the autoworkers who lost their jobs at the...

June jobs report: strong headline numbers, betraying numerous signs of rougher times Consumption leads employment. That’s true at bottoms, and it’s true at peaks as well. Since February, when consumption growth started to flag, I have been waiting for it to show up decisively in jobs numbers. In March through May, average growth decelerated from over 500,000/month to 400,000/month. So in this jobs report, I have been most interested to see if...

July 6, 2022, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson As taken from Letters from an American. A brief introduction as to how SCOTUS arrived at their opinion on Abortion. Accomplished by ignoring a long legal tradition extending from common law to the mid-1800s and even longer in some states. This tradition includes Mississippi tolerating the termination of pregnancy before the occurrence of Quickening. Quickening the being the time...

White Rabbit  I have finished reading to my two younger grandsons the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll. I read the edition with commentary by the late mathematician, Martin Gardner, who used to write for Scientific American. I also just listened to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” which is pretty bloody sharp, but which draws on both of the Alice books. While most attention is on the first one, “Wonderland,” which got made into a not bad...

Jobless claims continue to drift higher, are no longer a positive; but no recession signaled Initial jobless claims rose 4,000 to 235,000 last week, vs. the 50+ year low of 166,000 set in March. The 4 week average also rose by 750 to 232,500, compared with the all-time low of 170,500 three months ago.  Continuing claims rose 51,000 to 1,375,000, which is 69,000 above their 50 year low set on May 6: Initial claims have now been in an uptrend for...

As we have discussed, classical liberals and libertarians have an uneasy relationship with democracy.  The reason is obvious – classical liberals support unregulated or lightly regulated capitalism, and this is not a popular position with voters.  Of course, it could be that classical liberals support both capitalism and democracy, and reluctantly prioritize their commitment to democracy over their commitment to limited government.  Yet as...

May JOLTS report: a significant deceleration in the underlying jobs market has likely begun Late last year I introduced the idea that the jobs market was similar to a game of musical chairs, where employers added or took away chairs, and employees tried to best allocate themselves among the chairs.  Because of the pandemic, several million fewer players have been trying to sit in those chairs, leaving many empty. Additionally, there has been...

Abraham Lincoln quoting Thomas Jefferson on judicial despotism and oligarchy At Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858 Now, as to the Dred Scott decision; for upon that he [Douglas] makes his last point at me. He boldly takes ground in favor of that decision. This is one-half the onslaught, and one-third of the entire plan of the campaign. I am opposed to that decision in a certain sense, but not in the sense which he puts on it. I say that in...