The Angry Bear

March consumer inflation part 1: real wages decline sharply The March consumer inflation report was particularly important, and particularly bad. So much so that I am going to divide my comments into two separate posts. First, the news on real wages was terrible. While nominally nonsupervisory wages rose 0.4% in March, since inflation rose 1.2%, “real” wages declined -0.8% in March alone. On a YoY basis, real wages were down -1.8%:...

Housing affordability update: prices vs. mortgage payments; and ramifications for the economy No economic news today (Monday 4/11), and most States didn’t report new COVID cases over the weekend, so let’s take a look at something else; namely, housing affordability, which I’ve been meaning to update for several weeks. The first graph below compares 4 measures of house prices: the FHFA purchase index, the Case Shiller national index, and the...

People keep asking about when will Biden fire trump appointee Louis DeJoy? President Biden can not fire Dejoy. Federal law prevents the president from terminating the postmaster general under any circumstances. The nine-member board of governors nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate has the power to do so. Only five members of the board may belong to the same political party. In turn the board selects the postmaster general. The PG...

Is there an honest newspaper, magazine, etc. that people will read? People do not read any more. They will listen to some pundit on TV telling them how bad they have it. No gasoline lines to wait in, so you can’t complaint about that. Your drive-in maybe took 20 minutes to get that burger, you had to mask up at times, etc. Wow, really rough! Go back to 2008 when Republicans minimized any aid to citizens. The nation spent a few years getting out of...

April 10 2022 Natural Gas PricesRJS, Focus on Fracking, Summary; US natural gas prices hit 13 year high on falling production, falling inventories Oil prices ended the week lower for the fourth time out of the last five weeks, as the IEA countries joined the US in an unprecedented release of emergency oil reserves . . . after falling 12.8% to $99.27 a barrel last week after China locked down their largest city and Biden announced an...

Under the guise of “protecting” citizens, the Texas legislature, instead of having the gas companies eat their losses from Winter Storm Uri last year, have floated a $3.4 billion bond package to have the taxpayers fund it. The sales pitch is that the gas companies, three large and a smattering of smaller operators get made while whilst the citizens tax dollars fund the bailout over time. As most of you know, Texas doesn’t have income taxes, and...

Asymmetric Whining  This is not news, but yet again we see the old phenomenon of people whining a lot when something gets worse but then saying nothing when it gets better.  The latest example of that involves gasoline prices.  They were rising and got into the range of near-real highs seen in times like 2008, 1981, and 1918.  But now they have slid backward, down in the neighborhood of 20 cents per gallon where I am.  Crude prices are down as...

RJS, MarketWatch 666, Summary: US Trade Deficit Virtually Unchanged in February, Near Record High US trade deficit ticked lower February, as both our exports and imports increased, but the value of our exports rose slightly more than the value of our imports did . . . the Commerce Department report on our international trade in goods and services for February indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit fell by...

The current situation is that Russia has abandoned the effort to capture Kiev. Russian forces have been withdrawn from North Central Ukraine and are now operating on an arc from Kharkiv (North East) to Kherson (South Central). So far, Ukraine has won amazing victories and Russia has suffered astonishing defeats. The extreme surprise suggests that we can learn a lot from the war so far. What have we learned ? I will include things that we...