The Angry Bear

Economic Policy Institute offers an explanation that our current inflation is different from previous recessions in the US in addition to what NDd and Barkley Rosser offer : Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019....

Industrial production continues to show excellent growth I call industrial production the King of Coincident Indicators, because it speaks volumes about where the economy is at any particular moment, and empirically is the indicator whose peaks and troughs coincide most definitively with NBER recession dates. In April the story told by industrial production continued to be very positive, as total production rose by 1.1%, and manufacturing...

One of the biggest design flaws in the ACA is that subsidies for low-income families buying policies on insurance exchanges were too low.  Congress raised the subsidies temporarily, but now they are set to expire right before the November election.  From Huffpo: Health insurance premiums for millions of Americans will spike if Congress doesn’t act in the next few months, with particularly big increases in politically contested states, according to...

Adjudged to be AFFIRMED. Barrett, J., delivered the (her first?)  opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh, JJ., joined. Gorsuch, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., joined. Hmmm. Fill out an application for a driver’s license, make a mistake, by ticking the wrong box questioning citizenship, the state says you are still qualified to have a driver’s license. and the...

Writing in The Atlantic in May 2021, Hoeg, Prasad, and Ghandi argued that the United States should delay vaccinating children against COVID-19 until vulnerable adults are vaccinated in poorer countries around the world.  A similar argument could now be made for delaying boosters, at least for people who are not at high risk.  An unvaccinated elderly person in India or Africa is thousands of times more likely to die from COVID-19 than a healthy,...

Real retail sales signal further expansion, but also continue to suggest slower payrolls growth ahead Nominal retail sales for the month of April were up 0.9%, and previous months were revised higher. That means that, after inflation, real retail sales for April were up 0.6%, a very positive number. Yesterday I wrote that, rather than a YoY comparison with last April, during the stimulus spending spree, the more important comparison was...

What Is The Worst Part Of The Current Inflation In the US we may have seen the peak of overall inflation, with the annualized CPI rate increasing at 8.3% in April, down from 8.5% in March, the highest rate of increase in 40 years. The issue has become the reported top concern of the US public, according to polling, with the hot job market apparently not offsetting the concerns that have arisen due to the emergence of this high rate of...

No economic data today (May 16) of significance; but tomorrow one of my favorite economic indicators, retail sales, will be reported for April. Since real retail sales lead employment and generally are a short leading indicator for the economy as a whole, I wanted to update on what I see as their importance right now. Here are real retail sales per capita (red) vs. real aggregate payrolls per capita (blue), both normed to 100 as of last...

RJS: Focus on Fracking Summary: Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 21 year low, distillates supplies at a 17 year low; 300,000 bpd global oil surplus in April, despite loss of 1.2 million bpd from Russia & Kazakhstan; natural gas rigs at a 32 month high..   OPEC’s Report on Global Oil for April Thursday of this week saw the release of OPEC’s May Oil Market Report, which includes details on OPEC & global oil data for April, and hence it...