The Angry Bear

Green groves feed the townspeople crafting their wares for the benefit of an enlightened populace, the amber fields of grain are milled for bread for the troops to keep our sovereign democracy intact. The greatest of civilizations are measured by the strength of their army, the complexity of the structures that they construct, yet history tends to gloss over the fuel that stokes the fires of the greatest civilizations, the tended lands that feed...

History is the study of the past. We can not undo the past; but we can make use of knowledge of the past to help us understand what is going on now so as to make the right choices, to take the right actions for issues of the present now; and to better our odds for survival into the future. ——-past—————————————————–|now|———future——- Now is the present time interval (one of definable duration) between the past and the future that moves forward...

A quick note on the current state of affairs within the current Texas freeze, and the years worth of political nonsense that is the Texas Legislature. The fine folks over at Space City Weather, do a great job of keeping the Houston metro area informed of weather conditions, but their two leads, Eric and Matt also look at the broad perspective and encompass weather related knock ons, such as the electric grid, or our beloved ERCOT. The Texas...

December JOLTS report: with Omicron raging, the pool of potential employees refuses to fill, meaning more record wage gains The Census Bureau has started to release the JOLTS report earlier in the month. So we got December’s report yesterday as opposed to in a week or two.   Last month I introduced the idea of a game of musical chairs, where employers added or took away chairs, and employees tried to best allocate themselves among the chairs....

Manufacturing continues strong in January; construction continued to sag in December As usual, the first data for last month starts out with the ISM manufacturing report. This index, especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector.  In January the index declined from 58.8 to 57.6, as did the more leading new orders subindex, which declined from 61.0 to 57.9 (note the breakeven point...

My mind goes back to 2008. I was recently tempted to ask why bad loans by banks are a public problem. I was tempted to say that the bank made the loan, so it is their problem. If enough debtors default that the bank fails, so what? Then I remember the very appealing logic of the argument that, while other banks are free to save Lehman if they choose, no public money should be involved. That didn’t work out very well. The tempting pure market let...

Tax churn.  Or so I will suggest. There are two basic ways to improve the economic position of disadvantaged Americans using the income tax system.  The first approach, targeting, uses refundable tax credits to put more money in the hands of lower-income households.  Subsidies decrease for households with higher earnings.  The second approach is to use a Universal Basic Income, which gives refundable tax credits to everyone, regardless of...

 by New Deal democrat My long leading forecast through the end of 2022 My long leading forecast that goes 12 months out is now up at Seeking Alpha. I am as nerdy as can be, and follow the same indicators over and over, no matter what their message. And their message has been changing over the past 6 months. To find out what that means for the latter half of this year, click on over and read the article. As usual, this will equip you...

Surgery Tomorrow  I shall be having a parathyroid removed tomorrow (Feb. 2) at University of Virginia hospital. Will be going over this evening to avoid freezing fog.  So, I shall be out of commission for a while. Barkley Rosser