The Angry Bear

Where Will M.S. Gorbachev Be Buried?  Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev died on the same day as our daughter Sasha’s 33rd birthday. Sasha herself noted that if it were not for him she probably would not exist. It was ultimately Gorbachev who decided that the USSR would obey the Helsinki Accords rules on letting people get married and so on April 4, 1987 let my wife Marina leave Moscow for the US, the top story on CNN that evening. For that we are...

August jobs report: despite a good headline number, the decelerating trend resumes  I have written a number of times since February that the short leading indicators have signaled that we should expect weaker monthly employment reports, with both fewer new jobs and a higher unemployment rate. That was completely *not* the case in July, In August, would the decelerating trend kick in again? That it did. Since February the 3 month average in new...

Save The Post Office Steve Hutkins and Mark Jamison (retired NC postmaster) have been writing about the USPS for a long time now (years). This post is about Louis DeJoy’s efforts to centralize the Post Office into hubs with carriers leaving from the hubs and having local post offices becoming little more than retail outlets. Thereby making it more complex. His time of being removed for his office is fast approaching. Biden will be able to replace...

NYT article Pace of Climate Change Sends Economists Back to Drawing Board, Lydia DePillis, Aug. 25, 2022, a reporter on the Business desk at The New York Times. Previously, she covered federal agencies at ProPublica, the national economy at CNN, the Texas economy at The Houston Chronicle, labor and business at The Washington Post, the technology industry at The New Republic and real estate at the Washington City Paper. She grew up in Seattle and...

A respite in manufacturing in August, continued decline in construction in July As usual, the new month’s first data is for manufacturing and construction. Here’s a look at each. The ISM manufacturing index, and especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector. In August, after two months of showing slight contraction, the leading new orders subindex improved to 51.3, indicating expansion....

There has been a lot of criticism of Biden’s student loan forgiveness among economists and policy journalists.  And the criticism is not limited to libertarian types, but extends to many economists who clearly care about debt relief, progressivity, and improving the quality and accessibility of higher education but who are nonetheless very critical of the substance of the policy. I find it hard to know what to think.  On the one hand, the policy...

In which I parse and war-game the Trump “special master” litigation And now, for something completely different .. ..  While I have zero special knowledge about Federal criminal procedure, I *do* pay very close attention to “tells” in human behavior. (See, for example, my parsing of Bill Barr’s ‘summary’ of Mueller’s report summary, in which i accurately forecast what cherry-picking elisions Barr had made to Mueller’s document, which actually...

Student Loan debt and how much of this may shake out. Pretty simple when you look into the this for now. Student Loan by Borrower Age The data above is taken from the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS). A database maintained by the U.S. Department of Education to aggregate loan and grant data for all students who utilize federal funds to pay for school. There are different formats shown by this site (delinquency, etc.). ~~~~~~~~~...

June house price indexes show no peak yet; no respite likely in the “official” consumer housing measure Yesterday the Case Shiller and FHFA house price indexes were updated through June (technically, the average of April through June. Because the Case Shiller index is not seasonally adjusted, the best way to show them is YoY. Here are YoY% changes for the last 2 years of each (although the FHFA *is* seasonally adjusted, and increased only +0.1%...