The Angry Bear

Real retail sales for February: not recessionary, but not healthy either Let’s take a look at the February update for one of my favorite indicators, real retail sales. For the past few months, I have suspected that a sharp deceleration beginning with the consumer sector of the economy was more likely than not. At the moment, the verdict on that forecast is mixed. In February, nominal retail sales rose +0.3%. Since consumer inflation rose 0.8%,...

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.About, about, in reel and rout, The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue and white.And some in dreams assured were, Of the Spirit that plagued us so; Nine fathom deep he had followed...

Real wages for nonsupervisory employees make 19 month low, but no recession signaled Yesterday’s CPI report showed that prices increased 0.8% in February. Meanwhile, the jobs report indicated that average hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers increased 0.3%, so real hourly wages declined -0.5% for the month: As shown in the above graph, real wages had been essentially flat since July 2020, varying from 0.8% above, to -0.3% below. Pending...

Today’s lesson: never simply project the current trend forward An important reason why I am so insistent on dividing data into long leading, short leading, and coincident indicators is in order to avoid the most common pitfall in any forecasting, which is that of projecting the current trend forward. This morning PPI for February was reported. Frequently – but not always! – commodity prices lead producer prices, which in turn lead consumer...

Marx’s “most realistic… most amazing insight!” In his farewell lecture at Brandeis University, “Obsolescence of Socialism,” Herbert Marcuse quoted a passage from the Grundrisse and claimed that in Capital, Marx had “repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!” As large-scale industry advances, the creation of real wealth depends increasingly less on the labor time and the quantity of labor expended...

I just finished Robert Service’s biography of Lenin. The “Marxism” of Lenin was not Marxist at all. Classical Marxism holds that capitalism must achieve a high level of industrialization before the workers can overturn the landlords and factory owners and collectivize the fruits of labor for the benefit of workers. Like Mao, Lenin retrofitted socialist revolution to the circumstances. Since Russia at the end of the Romanov dynasty was still a...

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...