The Angry Bear

New home prices may have peaked after all – by New Deal democrat Yesterday I wrote, “The median price of a new home increased 1.7% in June (not seasonally adjusted), and remained sharply higher YoY at 15.1%.” That’s true, but it wasn’t complete. The 15.1% figure is from the quarterly average. On a monthly basis, the YoY% change was 7.4%. Here are the monthly and quarterly figures together: The monthly change is not seasonally adjusted, so...

“The media’s ongoing lies about Merrick Garland are doing a lot more harm than you think” – Palmer Report, James Sullivan An interesting little blurb on the impact of the latest President Joe Biden administration (Merrick Garland) action reminding hospitals they must do abortions if the mother’s life is endangered. As taken from the Palmer Report. Aside from deliberately lying about the nature of the DOJ’s probe into Jan 6, the media’s...

Coronavirus dashboard for July 27: likely at or past the BA.4&5 peak Let’s start with Biobot, since wastewater doesn’t lie. The bad news is, that it shows a nearly 50% increase between June 29 and July 20. The good news is, in the last week of that period, between July 13 and July 20, it only increased less than 4%, suggesting that the BA.5/July 4 superspreader celebration wave has peaked, at a level equivalent to 500,000 “real” cases (from a...

Maybe, I have not been looking hard enough with regard to information on Vicktor Orbán, his views, and his impact on Hungary and Europe. It appears our Republican leaning buddies have invited Viktor to come to Dallas, Texas. There he will address CPAC and a large gathering of American conservatives. Earlier this year, Viktor had told a bunch of Republicans to: “Have your own media. It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive...

What I have been reading this week . . . ~~~~~~~~ Politics “What Will Come of the January 6th Committee’s Case Against Trump?” | The New Yorker, Amy Davidson Sorkin “The committee itself cannot file criminal charges, though it can refer its findings to the Department of Justice. It’s not news to the D.O.J., of course, that laws were broken.” “EU ban on Russian gold puts Switzerland on the spot” – SWI swissinfo.ch “The European Union has...

New home sales continue to fall sharply, while prices for both new and existing homes continues to increase sharply New home sales declined further in June to 590,000 annualized and May was revised sharply lower as well: This was the lowest number since the pandemic lockdown month of April 2020, and before that since December 2018. It is also over 40% lower than the peak reading of 1.036 sales annualized in August 2020. This is absolutely...

“Who got rich off the student debt crisis?” – Reveal (revealnews.org), James B. Steele and Lance Williams A bit of a story of how we got to this student loan debt debacle. It is long, tedious, and not exciting. And this is only part of it. In 2016, 42 million people were owing $1.3 trillion in student debt. It is or was a profit center for Wall Street and also the government. I suspect Wall Street still gets its cut from student loans. Their...

Book notes on Reconstruction No economic news of note today, and as usual insufficient Covid reporting over the weekend to make an update of that worthwhile, so let me dig out something from the back burner that I wanted to do for myself. Last year I read Eric Foner’s 600+ page tome on Reconstruction, and this year read a treatment of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace,” which described his final days and to the extent available his coalescing...