The Angry Bear

 . . And Industrial Production isn’t too shabby, either Industrial production, the King of Coincident Indicators, was reported for October this morning in addition to real retail sales, discussed already in my last post. – and it was also quite positive. Total production increased 1.6% during the month, and manufacturing production increased 1.3%. This was the biggest monthly increase for total production since March of this year, and...

Repeated Lying About Lying  Of course, Donald Trump has been using this Big Lie method of simply endlessly repeating a Big Lie and successfully so with his claim that last year’s presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen,” according to the latest poll I just saw on the order of 70% of Republicans accepting this Big Lie. But this practice seems to be spreading for yet more degeneration happening as figures who have not done this like Trump...

“Letters From An American,” November 18, 2021; Professor Heather Cox – Richardson Today began with Republican leadership doubling down on its support for Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), whom the House censured yesterday for tweeting a cartoon video of himself killing a Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and attacking the president, Joe Biden. Only two Republicans voted with the Democrats in favor of the censure. Former...

Cheap trips to the lakes We are experiencing climate change with a vengeance in British Columbia. For the past four summers, we have had horrific wildfires that send smoke all the way from the interior to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Last summer, we had a record-breaking “heat dome” that killed over 600 people and, after registering all-time heat records for several days, the town of Lytton burned to the ground.  Currently, our third...

Housing construction continues to stabilize, but with record bottleneck in starts Last month I highlighted that housing constructions were stabilizing, following the stabilization in interest rates. This month continued that trend.  In October, housing starts (green in the graphs below) decreased -0.7% m/m, while the more leading total permits (blue) increased 4.0%. The less volatile single-family permits (red) increased 2.7%. As a result, the...

Dems Continue To Sink Despite Improving Economy  On the first page of today’s Washington Post was reported a poll showing that when a random sample was asked, 46% said they would vote for a generic Republican candidate for Congress versus 43% for a generic Democratic candidate. Given reported further pro-GOP gerrymandering, if this were to hold for next year’s midterms, GOP would certainly take solid control of the House, if not the Senate.  Not...

Now *that’s* good news: another blockbuster real retail sales report Yesterday I wrote that the financial and production sides of the economy still looked very positive and that today’s retail sales number would be especially important. Well, they were very positive, clocking in at up 1.7% month over month in October. Even after inflation, “real” retail sales were up 0.7%. September was unrevised. Although real retail sales are down -2.2% from...

Letters from an American re-postedNovember 16, 2021Heather Cox Richardson Nov 17Today, President Joe Biden hit the road to sell the benefits of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill he signed into law yesterday. In Woodstock, New Hampshire, today, standing at a bridge deemed structurally unsafe—one of the 215 unsafe bridges in New Hampshire—Biden said “Clean water, access to the internet, rebuilding bridges—everything in this bill matters...

Coronavirus dashboard for November 12: regional variations and the winter wave There’s a glitch in 91-Divoc collecting Johns Hopkins data, so the State by State totals have not been updated for several days, but here is Our World in Data’s update for the US as a whole: As of yesterday, cases are up only 3.5% from their recent low 2 weeks ago.Meanwhile, deaths have also stopped declining, but have not increased from their low of just...