The Angry Bear

(Dan here…follow the link to the comment section on Kevin Quinn’s somewhat cryptic post to learn more on economics) Muth and Lucas: Call your offices!  On his Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen describes the recent “purge” in the trucking industry. The pandemic shift in demand towards goods, as opposed to services, produced a big increase in the demand for trucking, which in turn produced a huge response, including a  big increase in the...

Initial claims continue weakening trend, but are not signaling recession this year Initial jobless claims declined -2,000 (from an upwardly revised 233,000), to 231,000 last week, vs. the 50+ year low of 166,000 set in March. The 4 week average rose further, by 7,250 to 231,750, compared with the all-time low of 170,500 twelve weeks ago.  Continuing claims declined 3,000 (from an upwardly revised 1,331,00) to 1,328,000, which is 22,000 above...

June 29, 2022, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson ~~~~~~~ What is up in this Letter?: The House Select Committee is considering to call “Pat” Cipollone to testify. Republican pundits are calling Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony devastating. Ginni is having second thoughts on discussing her “boilerplate and unremarkable” comments. A Ukrainian-born businessman is sentenced in Federal Court. ~~~~~~~ Today, the House Select...

The silver standard, one hundred and Thirty pieces of Silver’s thought “In evaluating fundraising for congressional candidates, the model now places more emphasis on contributions received within the candidate’s state. Fundraising is a highly nationalized activity these days; Democrats in California and New York regularly contribute to Senate campaigns like that of Democrat Jaime Harrison of South Carolina, who raised a record amount of money in...

The Democrats seem to be a bit uncertain about how to respond to the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe.  This isn’t surprising.  They face enormous pressure from their voters to “do something”, but there is, in fact, little they can do that will materially improve the situation of pregnant women in the short term.  Despite the moral urgency of the situation, they are forced to (mostly) play a long game, hardly an enviable position to be in.  Let’s take a...

RJS: MarketWatch 666 Summary: modest revision. The internals were revised as much as I’ve ever seen. PCE growth from 3.1% to 1.8%, real gross private domestic investment growth from 0.5% to 5.0%. Mostly due to greater inventories. Those 1st quarter inventories set up the 2nd quarter for a fall. ~~~~~~~ 1st Quarter GDP Revised to Show Our Economy Shrunk at a 1.6% Rate ~~~~~~~ The Third Estimate of our 1st Quarter GDP from the Bureau of...

Two long leading indicators – real money supply and credit conditions – worsen  – by New Deal democrat ~~~~~~~ M1 and M2 money supply for May was reported yesterday by the Fed. The former was unchanged for the month, and the latter was up a tiny 0.1%: That is significant. Why? Because real money supply is a long leading indicator. Real M2 fell out of favor after failing to actually decline YoY prior to the 2001 and 2008 recessions, but a...

I have a post up at Science-Based Medicine about the pitfalls and dangers of moralistic political thinking. The focus is on COVID, but the lessons are much more broadly relevant. Here’s the lede: The American policy response to COVID left a great deal to be desired. Figuring out what went wrong and how to do better next time should be at the top of our list going forward. But getting reform right will be difficult if we succumb to the temptation...

House prices continued to surge through April; expect no meaningful moderation in the CPI anytime soon House price increases continued to go through the roof as of April, as reported this morning in both the Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes. The Case Shiller national index rose another 2.1% for the month and 20.4% YoY, just 0.1% below last month’s biggest YoY% gain ever, while the FHFA purchase only index rose 1.6% for the month, and...