The Angry Bear

Latest school book banning in certain areas of the country as presented by The Atlantic. Black Boy by Richard Wright, The Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as challenged by the Livingston (county. Michigan) Organization for Values in Education where I used to live. Catcher in The Rye did not make it on the banned list. Here is The Atlantic‘s list of banned books. The first one is a surprise. Harper...

This is one of the times when I missed the BLS annual adjustment also. RJS was right on the money this morning in reporting it. A portion of the 467,000 was due to adjustments in December and January data. RJS, MarketWatch 666, Employers Add 467,000 Jobs in January, Unemployment Rate Rises to 4.0% The Employment Situation Summary for January from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated a decent level of job creation during the month, while the...

Oil supplies at a 10 year low;  SPR at a 19 year low, total oil & products supplies at 7 1/2 year low; Omicron hit to demand leads to largest 5 week increase of gasoline inventories in 32 years RJS: The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA, Focus on Fracking US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending January 28th indicated that despite a jump in our oil imports and a drop in our oil...

J.P. McJefferson writes: “On a Friday afternoon in February, I finally sense a glimmer of hope. Mike Pence finding truth in his heart and openly confronting Trump & his lot of criminals by reinforcing the fact that he had no authority to overturn the election and saying Trump is “wrong”. A direct slap in the face to Trump. Maybe it will be the beginning of the formal split in the party between right & wrong/evil. Along with Liz Cheney...

Here is Michael Bang Petersen in the New York Times: As a researcher and an adviser to the Danish government on the pandemic, I have repeatedly stressed that we need to make complex trade-offs between deaths, the economy, public well-being and constitutional rights. There is not a single right answer for how to proceed. Within the set of legitimate strategies, the choice of strategy is often less important than whether or not people follow and...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 31 – February 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There is an old market saying that “the cure for high prices is, high prices.” Well, commodity prices, and in particular industrial commodities and oil, are at new multi-year highs. The latter is going to feed right through into higher gas prices that will be very much noticed by consumers. And if there is...

RJS @ MarketWatch 666, Construction Spending Rose 0.2% in December after Prior Months Were Revised Higher The Census Bureau’s report on construction spending for December (pdf) estimated that the month’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,639.9 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.2 percent (± 0.8 percent)* above the revised November estimate of a $1,636.5 billion rate annually, and 9.0...

The stability and growth pact regulated the fiscal policy of Euro bloc countries. It is currently suspended, because of Covid. There is an ongoing discussion of whether to reactivate it when the epidemic ends or whether to replace it with something else. I strongly advocate eliminating it and replacing it with nothing. Very very rounghly, the pact limited cyclically adjusted public budget deficits to 0.5% of GDP. The possibility of suspending...

January jobs report: huge gain in wages, huge upward revisions to past few months, limited Omicron impact Here are the three issues I was looking to see addressed in this jobs report: 1. Would last month’s “poor” 199,000 number of new jobs be revised higher? 2. Is wage growth holding up? Is it accelerating?3. In December, big decreases in the number of initial jobless claims were not reflected in a better jobs number. Would the big increase in...

“What they create [in their free time] has something superfluous about it.” I am finding it difficult to proceed with writing about free time because I am not having enough opportunity to talk out these questions with people in person. (Comments on Sandwichman’s post over at Econospeak is worth a thoughtful pause and and consideration…Dan) Tags: free time...