The Angry Bear

Summary Commenter RJS: US oil supplies at a 13 year low, SPR at a 19 year low: total oil + products supplies at a 7 1/2 year low, distillate supplies at 26 month low after refinery freeze off 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 11th indicated that after a big drop in our oil exports, a major slowdown in our oil refining due to...

Reading the first few paragraphs of Last War Brain by Noah Smith, I thought I would strongly disagree with his post and decided to write an attempted rebutal. I find that I agree almost 100% and can mainly complain about what I assert is a bit of bait and switch. As always I advise readers to just click the link. Noah is a much better writer than I am (low bar) so my effort to summarize and explain might best be skipped (skip to ***) Noah argues...

Trying To Make Sense Of The Confusion  On the one hand Russian media is telling Russians that Russian troops will leave Belarus when exercises there end on Feb., 20, coinciding with the end of the Winter Olympics, and also sends out videos of troops supposedly being pulled back. OTOH, US officials declared based on reported satellite evidence that 7,000 more troops have gone to “the Ukrainian border” with a chance of Russia invading Ukraine very...

Introduction I am fortunate to have made the acquaintance of Kip Sullivan from reading his articles and exchanging notes over the last couple of years. He is one of the more knowledgeable authorities on Single Payer as well as healthcare costs and price, commercial healthcare insurance, Traditional versus Advantage Medicare, and why today’s healthcare is not working efficiently. For example, commercial insurance administration costs are an...

This is a follow-on to Dan’s commentary on living on the East Coast or in the Southwest region of the country. I live in an area of the Southwest which is not experiencing the harsher impact of climate change. Even so, the higher temperatures create a drier atmosphere, thirsty for moisture, which it draws from a region’s soil, rivers, lakes and the snowpack. This atmospheric demand, called a vapor pressure deficit (“VPD” for short), has reached...

Without efforts to control human-caused global warming, we should consider the current extremes a preview of coming attractions.  While the mega drought continues in the west and southwest:  Although the 2021 summer monsoon was good – well above average in some places – it was not enough to counter the cumulative shortfalls of the preceding years. The cumulative precipitation for the 20-month period was the lowest on record, dating back to...

A note on producer prices and (possibly) cooling inflation One point I make from time to time is that, with seasonally adjusted data, YoY comparisons can miss, or at least lag, turning points. We *may* have such a situation developing with producer prices as evidenced by this morning’s report (Feb. 15). On a YoY basis, producer prices for finished goods (red in the graph below) are up 12.5%, while commodity prices are up 19.3%. Consumer...

The current trend in both cases and deaths in the US has me the most hopeful I have been in over 6 months. Here’s why. Nationwide, cases have declined to 150,000, only 30,000 above their level just before The Omicron wave started, and about 10,000 less than their Delta peak: The Omicron wave has been almost completely symmetrical. Cases started to rise exponentially roughly on December 15. They peaked about 4.5 weeks later. Now, about 4.5...

There has been quite a lot of news over the past few years regarding agriculture specific to governmental assistance, from providing crop subsidies during the Trump Trade War to the Biden Administrations attempt to tamp down inflation via meat processing capacity increases, as well as an attempt to revive a few ideas that had been tabled by previous administrations. The largest focus for the USDA is without a doubt the SNAP food assistance program...