The Angry Bear

All this we’ve been hearing about the sanctity of the Second Amendment? Seems that what the Second really means is that Americans have the right to buy assault weapons to use to exercise their right to overthrow the government. That big surge in AR-15 purchases after the election of Barack Obama? Turns out that it wasn’t about defending the purchasers from criminals after all. It was about arming a well-armed militia that could overthrow the US...

On the road, and missing all the fun on Wall Street . . . I’m still on the road, and there is no important economic statistic to report, but I will make a brief market comment. YoY stocks are now down 10%. Except for the very bad 1982 and 2008 recessions, and the 2000 Nasdaq bubble and the 1987 crash (which were prolonged bear markets), that has typically been close to their YoY lows: And with rare exception that level has only been hit...

RJS Focus on Fracking Summary: Oil price sees highest weekly close in 13 years; natural gas price hit new 13 year high before falling back Oil prices rose for a seventh consecutive week as record high fuel prices showed no signs of dampening demand. After rising 3.3% to $118.87 a barrel last week as China ended their lockdowns and the EU banned 90% of Russian oil imports, the contract price for US light sweet crude for July delivery jumped to...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 6 – 10 and a comment on COVID I’m still traveling, so light posting for a couple days more. In fact, I neglected to post a link to my Weekly Indicators on Saturday. A bit tardy, here it is. Conditions across all time frames do not look so good, and with Friday’s poor inflation report, I expect the Fed to continue stomping on the brakes – especially since we know that the YoY change in rents...

I grew up in Oak Ridge TN, where the uranium was enriched for the Hiroshima bomb. There’s a recent piece on the NYT on Oak Ridge and desegregation. One of the local players at the time was Waldo Cohn, a chemist and symphony conductor, who was on the school board at the time. Here’s his account:MR. COHN: So, this Advisory Town Council met every week, every second week with him. There were seven people. I was interested in not only community affairs,...

I do not remember the first time I ran across Treehugger. It was probably at Slate where I was writing in Moneybox and The Best of The Fray. Slate was featuring Treehugger in a series called “Go on an eight-week carbon diet” as written by Meaghan O’Neil in October 2006. Time does fly, doesn’t it? Not everyone gets satisfaction with Treehugger’s offerings as Jack Schafer at Slate points out. But then, maybe he was agitating? You know, stirring the...

RJS: Focus on Fracking Summary: US oil supplies at a 17½ year low with SPR at a 35 year low; refinery utilization highest since 2019, refinery throughput highest in 17 months; gasoline supplies at a 6 month low even with gasoline imports at a 46 week high The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending June 3rd indicated that after a major drop in our...

A Deadline Passes And Stalin Is Exchanged For Peter The Great, Barkley Rosser, Econospeak  I am not all that much into posting about the ups and downs of the Special Operation in Ukraine, but it seems that there has been one of those lines crossed. While it was not widely publicized, June 10 was apparently a deadline set by V.V. Putin for Russian forces to conquer Severodonetsk.  While reportedly they control a solid majority of that now mostly...

I have been bugging Alan at Student Loan Justice to talk more about Student Loan interest, etc. accumulating on these loans. As you can see it is not unusual to accumulate more interest or other costs than the original loan amount. It is also not unusual for the servicer to collect interest before paying down the principal. These loans will be with these people forever and to their graves. I do not know of any consumer loans...