The Angry Bear

EconoSpeak: Playing With The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Barkley Rosser Over the last month crude oil prices have noticeably declined from in the neighborhood of $85-86 per barrel to $78-80 per barrel. But there has been only a very small decline in retail gasoline prices, and the headlines even as of yesterday was all about “sharply rising gas prices.”  So, Pres. Biden has moved to release a record amount of oil from the Strategic Petroleum...

Thanksgiving finds Bill is in Arizona in a new home. If he is not on site early in the morning, you will know why in the Midwest and East Coast. He reports the ordering of a turkey dinner this year as it was too difficult to move all the people together for a family dinner so soon. Christmas spent together will be a bigger celebration in 2021. My own family is all together for the first time in a couple years in California. We traveled there a...

Lowest new jobless claims in over half a century The first two of four data releases this morning were corporate profits for Q3 and jobless claims for last week.Corporate profits, a long leading indicator, increased slightly in Q3 over Q2, by 1.9% or 4.2% depending on whether you include various inventory adjustments. Deflated by unit labor costs, they either increased by 0.3% or decreased by -0.1%. While they haven’t decreased significantly in...

Former Washington Monthly writer Nancy Le Tourneau had this post up on her own site Horizons. The topic? Biden signing proclamations restoring the original boundaries of Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Northeast Canyons, and Seamounts National Monuments. “A President for ALL Americans,” Horizons, Nancy LeTourneau’s big picture look at politics and life Nancy: I didn’t recognize the picture on the left. It was apparently taken...

Some, if not all, of the original thirteen may have had some claim to state’s rights in that as individual and separate colonies they had known some autonomy. None of the states admitted later, with the possible exception of Texas, had claim to such rights. Any legitimate claim by Texas, or any of the thirteen original, was abrogated with their secession from the Union during the Civil War. So many of our current ills are attributable to this...

Existing home sales and prices, increase slightly; inventory declines slightly [Programming note: There will be at least 4 significant reports tomorrow (Nov: 23): jobless claims, personal income and spending, new home sales, and corporate profits for Q3. Then nothing for the rest of the week. I may or may not report on everything tomorrow. I may hold some for Wednesday or Friday. Also, I will probably put up a Coronavirus Dashboard Wednesday or...

MarketWatch 666 Blogger RJS on the macroeconomic implications of retail sales, estimates the impact of retail sales on GDP. Retail Sales Rose 1.7% in October after August & September Sales Were Revised Higher Seasonally adjusted retail sales increased 1.7% in October after retail sales for August and September were revised higher…the Advance Retail Sales Report for October (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that seasonally adjusted...

Classical liberalism has an uneasy relationship with democracy.  Friedrich Hayek, for example, argued in The Constitution of Liberty and in Law, Legislation, and Liberty that democracy might need to be suspended to preserve liberal economic institutions.  And he meant it, as his support for Pinochet in Chile made clear.  Democracy in America is now under serious threat due to the increased radicalization of the Republican party.  Donald Trump...

Nobody is getting laid off: the continuing saga  Initial claims declined another 1,000 this week to 268,000, and the 4 week average declined 5,250 to 272,750, both – yet again – new pandemic lows: For the past 50 years, initial claims have only been at these levels for 2 months at the peak of the late 1990’s tech boom, and from late 2015 to just before the pandemic in 2020.’ Continuing claims also declined 129,000 to a new pandemic low...