The Angry Bear

The Elixir of Commerce McCulloch, J. R. (John Ramsay). Outlines of political economy: being a republication of the article upon that subject contained in the Edinburgh Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica: together with notes explanatory and critical, and a summary of the science / by John M’Vickar. New York, 1825. The Making Of The Modern World. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. Rasbotham, Dorning. Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton...

Consumer spending continues OK, while income continues its seemingly relentless decline Nominally personal income rose 0.5%, and spending rose 0.2% in February. That’s the good news.  The bad news is the personal consumption deflator, i.e., the relevant measure of inflation, rose 0.6%, so real income declined -01%, and real personal spending declined -0.4%. While both real income and spending are well above their pre-pandemic levels, I...

The Moral Philosophers’ Stone: A Compleat History of ‘A Certain Quantity of Labour to be Performed’ Two weeks ago Back in 2011 a hunch about Charles Dickens and Edward Carleton Tufnell led me to the discovery of what I surmised might be the prototype of the idea that has come to be known to economists as “the lump of labor.” To my surprise, it was a subtle and articulate defense by a fairly prominent early 19th-century political economist of the...

Jobless claims continue near or at record lows Initial claims (blue) rose to 14,000 to 202,000, just above last week’s 50 year low. The 4 week average (red) declined 3, 500 to 208,500 (vs. the pandemic low of 199,750 on December 25). Continuing claims (gold, right scale) declined 35,000 to  1,307,000, the lowest number since December 1969: With Omicron in the rear view mirror, and BA.2 more of a ripple so far, we are having a COVID respite,...

RJS, Focus on Fracking US oil supplies are at a 14 – year low; commercial crude supply at a 42 month low, SPR at a 19½ year low; total oil + products supplies at a 95 month low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending March 25th indicated that even after a big decrease in our oil exports, we had to take oil out of stored commercial crude supplies...

Similar to 1973, we are faced with an energy crisis or a coming one. Our usage/demand is outstripping supply. The nation is a bit more prepared this time. I am not seeing the long lines waiting to add a couple of gallons of gasoline to top off. We have done a lot since 1973 in the US while European countries are doing more. This rendition of 10 points of things we could do is taken from Treehugger, authored by Lloyd Alter, and entitled...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 28 – April 1 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The big news of the week was the spreading yield curve inversion in the Treasury market.* Needless to say, that puts another bullet in the body of the long leading forecast – but it’s still not negative. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment on the economic data, and my...

 The Road to SerfRanddom I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — “Why the worst get on top.” Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek’s argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary? Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a...

A bold step forward yesterday as taken by a Federal Judge striking down much of the new election law passed by the Florida legislature, after the 2020 election, and under the guise of nonexistent fraudulent voting activity in Florida. The main thrust of passing this bill was to make it harder for minorities and others who might vote for non-Republican candidates to vote. As Tallahassee, Florida Federal District Judge Tom Walker wrote in his 288-page...

February JOLTS report: the game of musical chairs in the jobs market goes on This morning (Tuesday) the Census Bureau JOLTS report for February shows that the game of musical job chairs continues.   As a refresher, several months ago I introduced the idea of a game similar to musical chairs, where employers added or took away chairs, and employees tried to best allocate themselves among the chairs. Because of the pandemic, there are several...