The Angry Bear

by Joseph Joyce The Restructuring of Sovereign Debt The economic repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be devastating for many countries that have yet to recover from the pandemic. Higher prices for commodities, particularly energy and food, will increase inflation rates and widen trade deficits for those nations that import those items. Increases in interest rates will raise the cost of debt financing and hamper the ability of...

Jay Battacharya and Martin Kulldorff, two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, have been whining for months about how unfairly they have been treated, how they have been criticized and even censored for their views on COVID policy.  Yet now, at the Brownstone Institute, that illustrious citadel of liberal freedom, we find them saying this (my bold): In public health, it isn’t enough to be trusted by only half the population. Since...

I should stop posting about Ukraine, since I have no expertise and not much ability to judge the credibility of things I read.  But I keep reading and want to share some twitter threads about Russian logistics that I found interesting.  I had assumed that the Russians would eventually get their logistics problems more or less ironed out, or at least they could “solve” them by throwing enough men and material at the Ukrainians, but it seems like at...

RJS; MarketWatch 666, Covered here is everything having a major price change. This includes the 2.4% increase in the price index for men’s underwear, the 3.8% increase in the price index for women’s underwear, and also prices for what are now more than 40 items having a double-digit year over year increase. CPI Rose 0.8% in February on Higher Prices for Food, Fuel, Clothing, Appliances, Rent, Insurance, & Airfare; Annual Inflation at a 40 Year...

Another big increase in consumer prices in February, as the yield curve tightens Consumer prices increased 0.8% in January, the fourth time in five months that it has exceeded 0.5%. YoY inflation is now 7.9%, the highest rate since 1982. My favorite measure, CPI ex energy, is also up 6.6% YoY, the worst since the 1981-82 recession as well: My rationale for tracking CPI ex-energy is that, unless energy costs filter through into the...

RJS, Focus on Fracking, Oil jumps $15 to a 13½ year high, then tumbles $21; natural gas supplies now 16% below normal Oil prices fell for just the second time since November this week, but not before jumping nearly $15 to a new 13½ year high before the market even opened for the week . . . after rising 26.3% to a 13½ year high of $115.68 a barrel last week after much of Russia’s oil was sanctioned or eschewed by the market, the contract price for...

Misunderstanding of Climate Change and Why it Matters: The Energy Price Spike The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a spike in oil and gas prices worldwide.  A natural response is for countries with untapped reserves to expand production as quickly as possible, but doesn’t this contradict the pledges they have also made to combat climate change?  This issue is covered at some length in a New York Times article today, and the entire...

An iconic American wilderness turns 150, National Geographic A “paradox of the cultivated wild.” That’s how National Geographic Explorer David Quammen  characterized Yellowstone National Park in a celebrated edition of National Geographic. In that issue, an epic ecosystem – it’s the biggest complex of mostly untamed landscape and wildlife within the lower 48 states – received epic treatment. On February 25th, Yellowstone National Park turned...

JOLTS report for January: the game of employment musical chairs continues The Census Bureau JOLTS report for January, released this morning, indicates that the jobs market continues to be nowhere near equilibrium – which continues to be a good thing for workers’ wages.   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...