The Angry Bear

Amazing Republicans are trying to skew the peaceful (so far) protests of pro-choice consisting mostly of women as being violent. Not that they never get angry . . . they can and will. They are not happy with SCOTUS and are making it known peacefully. Cruz and others are trying to make this into something else similar to what Cruz was supporting January 6, 2021. Waiting on V.P. Pence Ted Cruz smugly sitting in the capitol building January 6th...

With the Fed already having begun to “stomp on the brakes,” inflation is still running very hot As promised, here is my second post on the April CPI number. The YoY advance in consumer prices, +8.3%, is down from last month’s 8.6%, which was the highest 12 month rate since 1981. As I suggested last month, “the spike in gas prices may be – to use a recently dreaded word – transitory,” since gas prices had declined 5% month over month at the time...

Andrew writes on healthcare, mostly the PPACA plan and the various metal plans, and the latest gig (ARPA) resulting in lower costs for anyone under 250% FPL and lower costs for anyone higher than 400% FPL. All made possible due to Biden and Democrat’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. It will expire EOY 2022 and I doubt Manchin will help with it. Without it and other aid, This all could have been a 2008 Redux. Mostly, what you will catch me...

Real wages unchanged, real aggregate payrolls rose slightly in April Consumer inflation for April was +0.3%, the lowest monthly advance since last August. The number was helped by a big decline in energy prices, down -2.7% for the month, and also by used cars, down -0.4% for the month. In this post I’ll report on the impact on wages. I’ll put up a separate post with more general comments later. Since nominal nonsupervisory wages rose 0.4% in...

Steve Schmidt has created his own Substack to tell his story. It is about lying, lying in politics, lying as a politician, and his lying. It is one hell of an interesting read, I only put part of this up. You can see the rest “here” or clicking on part of the title. Steve Schmidt’s Substack, “The Warning” Intro; “Steve Schmidt is a strategic advisor, who has counseled Heads of State, CEOs, leading athletes, major corporations, academic...

Q1 Senior Loan Officer Survey: strong demand for loans, but accommodation ends The Senior Loan Officer Survey for Q1 was published yesterday (May 10), generally covering the supply of, and demand for, bank credit. It has two components that qualify as long leading indicators for the economy, as they have typically turned about one year before the onset of a recession over their 30+ year history. First, the below graph is of the percentage of...

It’s hard to know why things shake out in Congress the way they do.  Why hasn’t there been agreement on a climate bill?  Why hasn’t a compromise been reached on a child tax credit?  Why not better preparation for the next pandemic, or even for the next wave of this pandemic?  From the outside it’s hard to say, but I am inclined to think that Schumer and Biden both bear considerable responsibility for these failures. A deeply disturbing article by...

From Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden said on Monday he is worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not have a way out of the Ukraine war, and Biden said he was trying to figure out what to do about that.. . .Biden said Putin is a very calculating man and the problem he worries about now is that the Russian leader “doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.” As far as I can tell, Biden has...

A “Big Picture” look at housing at Seeking Alpha; plus an in-depth look at existing home sales and inventory I have one of my periodic “Big Picture” looks at housing up over at Seeking Alpha. One economic relationship – whether sales lead inventory for existing homes as well as new ones – has been extremely difficult to nail down, since for the past number of years the NAR has only allowed FRED to post the last one year of its data.  Well,...