The Angry Bear

RJS, Focus on Fracking; Summary; Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 20-year low; US distillates exports at a 45 month high leaves domestic supplies at an 8 year 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 April 8th indicated that after a near record decrease in our oil exports, we were able to add surplus oil to our stored commercial crude...

Some History 2014: A frenzy of hospital mergers into ACOs as detailed by Philip Longman and Paul Hewitt could leave many families having lesser amounts of healthcare paid for by healthcare insurance due to healthcare industry consolidation leading to higher prices. We have seen this happen with higher prices for insurance plans, increased deductibles, and less covered. I think we have all experienced this in the last couple of years,...

March consumer inflation part 2: I told you so; the Fed *must* start paying attention to house price indexes This is the second part of my take on the March consumer inflation report. As you may have already read, total inflation clocked in at +1.2% for March alone! YoY consumer prices are up 8.6%, the highest 12-month rate since 1981. As anticipated, gas prices were a huge contributor; less energy, prices were up 0.4%; less both food and...

This comes by way of New Deal Democrat who was doing some research and ran across a not so recent Krugman article via the late Economist’s View blog. Krugman’s prescient words of things to come? Hat tip to New Deal democrat and a thank you for sending this to me. “The Great Illusion” Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role...

Tough Guy, senator Mitch McConnell making political hay over President Joe Biden extending a student loan moratorium for a few more months. The mistake Joe is making or has made is not deciding what to do. It is getting late in the game of politics. Here is senator Mitch McConnell. “I think in this country, it’s important to remind people that we ought to pay our debts,” McConnell opined. “We all pay our debts. And with regard to extending the...

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...