The Angry Bear

Continuing claims continue near 50 year lows as the Omicron tsunami continues to recede, NDd [Programming note: Hopefully I’ll put up a coronavirus update later today.]Initial claims (blue) declined 18,000 to 215,000 (vs. the pandemic low of 188,000 on December 4). The 4 week average (red) declined 6,000 to 230,500 (vs. the pandemic low of 199,750 on December 25). Continuing claims (gold, right scale) increased 2,000 to 1,476,000, (vs....

Monetary Sovereignty, Sanctions and Russian Economic Policy The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to the center stage if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial...

There is the forbidden, there is the given, the meek, and the powerful, sustenance all the same. Biblically, the laws of kashrut were rather explicit, has scales, no kids in mothers’ milk, cloven hooves, well, there is a debate. How does it eat? The kosher laws were crafted initially as a code of conduct not for morality as we see it now, but about purity, cleanliness, safety. Keeping us alive. Little was known almost 6,000 years ago about...

RJS, Everything Got Worse . . . US oil supplies at a 13-year low; SPR at a 19 1/2-year low, total oil + products supply at a 94-month low after across the board draws; distillate supplies at a twenty-seven-month 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 February 25th indicated that after a big jump in our oil exports and a drop in our oil...

February car sales decline, but truck sales continue rebound; plus a comment about the urgency of dealing with supply chain issues I used to follow vehicle sales more closely – until the vehicle manufacturers, one by one, stopped reporting monthly, and only updated quarterly for the previous quarter. That makes the data much less timely, so much less useful. Fortunately the BEA does keep track of sales, although for some reason FRED is only...

The low levels of Lake Powell and the lack of rainfall in the west are not symptoms of drought. They are stages of Global Warming.

World wide, wearing masks prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. When vaccines became widely available, they prevented millions of hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Both could have saved many more lives, prevented many more hospitalizations but for opposition to masking and vaccination. So why were so many Americans opposed to the requiring of wearing masks and vaccination? “An...

As winter has begun to subside (finally) the real flurry of activity has to happen in short time, as in an every ray of sunshine has to be captured kind of thrust into the growing season. This is also the poorest time you will see farmers as they dump their entire wealth into yet another growing season. I can confirm; we’ve been running for a week straight and have committed the kids toothfairy money to compost, with no end in sight. My son will...

War, Waste, and the Myth of Progress In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse listed four authors — Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, William H. White, and Fred J. Cooks — whose works were of “vital importance” to his analysis. In the text, he mentioned “the affluent society” several times, which, of course, was the title of a famous book by John Kenneth Galbraith.  Galbraith, Mills, and White all cited Thorstein Veblen in...