The Angry Bear

 Median prices for existing homes is probably at peak; expect inventory to continue to increase Existing home sales were reported yesterday for September, up 7% month over month on a seasonally adjusted basis. While they are about 90% of the market, they are much less important for the economic cycle than are new home sales, which will be reported next week. I suspect new home sales will increase, since interest rates stabilized at very low...

Joel Eissenberg, Ph.D., Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology I got the Moderna vaccine as part of the phase III clinical trial back in August and September 2020. Although it was technically a blinded trial, I knew from my symptoms after the second shot I was in the vaccine arm and not the placebo arm of the clinical trial. Nevertheless, I got myself tested for the spike antibody and confirmed it. Indeed, the levels were over eight...

Jobless claims show renewed downward trend; still some slack in continued claims Jobless claims declined 6,000 this week to 290,000, yet another pandemic low. The 4 week average also declined 15,250 to 319,750, also another pandemic low: With the exception of the last few years of the last expansion, this level of weekly initial claims would be very low for any point in the last 50 years, and the 4 week average would be average for late in...

Coronavirus dashboard for October 20: as the Delta downtrend slows, is any State closing in on “herd immunity”? It’s been a moment since my last dashboard. That’s primarily because the Columbus Day weekend resulted in anomalies for the past 9 days, that have finally mainly but not completely resolved. Here’s a look at the past 6 months for both cases and deaths per 100,000: As of today, cases are finally down more than 50% from the...

Death Valley is not experiencing a drought. Neither is the Mojave, the Sahara, or the Gobi. A drought is an unusually extended period between the occurrence of a regularly occurring event; an anomaly. For example, when it usually rains on a regular basis, then but doesn’t rain for an unusually long period; that period during which it doesn’t rain is known as a drought. Rain in the desert is an anomaly; the lack thereof is neither an anomaly nor a...

A Thousand Words, Version 3 Tags: Covid 19, GOP, rational expectations, risk management, vaccinations

Justices Barrett, Alito, and Thomas have been panhandling. Begging for respect. Turns out that without respect; a Justice is nothing. All six imagined it to be right up there next to Moses, Joseph Smith and those guys; maybe even higher. Didn’t understand that any respect came down from their predecessors, from the legitimacy of their appointment; not from god. They thought that once seated, theirs was the voice of god. Turns out; the people, even...

This action by the Michigan Republican part does not surprise me in the least. Republicans have had control of the Senate since 1983 and the House (from what I can see) since 1990. They have had a trifecta (including the governor’s office) 2 of 4 times for a number of years also. Much of this has occurred because of gerrymandering state house and senate and federal congressional districts. In 2020 the anybody but trump or biden vote did not apply...

Suppose that you believe, as I do, that the threat to American democracy posed by Donald Trump and his Republican enablers and imitators is by far the most important issue confronting us today.  One implication of this view is that opinion leaders – politicians, pundits, academics, journalists – should make every effort to forestall disaster by educating people about the risk of democratic backsliding, and trying to bring people together to preserve...