The Angry Bear

Housing and car sales, oh my! [If last week was a slow week for economic data, this week is a virtual wasteland until Thursday, so I took yesterday off.] Last month I wrote that typically it has taken at least a 20% decline in housing construction to be consistent with an oncoming recession and that we weren’t there yet. As of the most recent housing permits report, single-family permits were down 17% from their recent peak: One...

Over at 538, Nathaniel Rakich points out that Biden’s approval rating is continuing to decline, despite the fact that Afghanistan coverage has declined.  It’s hard to know what is going on here, but my guess is that two factors outside Afghanistan are important.  First, the pandemic is dragging on, and people tend to blame the President and his party for not fixing problems.  This reflects what Brendan Nyhan called the Green Lantern theory of the...

Commenter and Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666, “Trade Deficit Rose 4.2% to a Record High in August on Higher Imports of Pharmaceuticals and Services” Our trade deficit rose by 4.2% in August as the value of both our exports and our imports increased, but the value of our imports increased by four times as much . . . the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for August indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods...

Michael Smith, Real Farmer and Farm Economist Ooh boy have we got a lot going on in ag world. Run sent me this a little while ago and I think this is important. The Tricky New Way That Big Ag Is Getting Farm Data, The Atlantic, Claire Kelloway, October 5, 2021 Big data collection is 100% not in the favor of the farmer by corporations. The more we see John Deere et al get tech heavy where they are collecting data about the equipment used...

EconoSpeak: Will Krysten Sinema Change Parties?, Barkley Rosser, October 5, 2021 I have resisted posting something like this, but while I have yet to see anybody else suggest it, this possibility has been on my mind now for several days. We have never seen to my knowledge a senator refuse to offer their views on possible resolution of a major disagreement involving money.  The contrast to Sen. Sinema is her associate in the Senate in blocking...

Democratizing Work I was a bit skeptical of the Global Forum on Democratizing Work. It seemed to me that rushing into an online conference was perhaps a bit over ambitious and misdirected for a relatively new initiative that arose out of a collective letter to the editors of newspapers. Anyway, I attended three-session today, two of them for their entirety and I was not disappointed. I mean my skepticism was not disappointed. A session on...

Politicians, preachers, and other charlatans have long known people were manipulable. They had achieved their mastery of the craft of manipulation by observation and practice. By craft, they were con artists. In another sense, they were psychologists before there was such. Before 1860, psychology was a branch of philosophy. A German, Wilhelm Wundt, was one of the first to proclaim psychology a science in its own right and the first to proclaim...

Michael Smith on the Open Thread: “‘Found this interesting. Tucked in the reconciliation bill they want to mandate employers with 5+ employees to contribute up to 10% to an IRA. Failure to do so is ‘taxed’.”  Hidden In The Reconciliation Bill: A Retirement Plan Mandate That Will Take Most People By Surprise, Forbes, Elizabeth Bauer, September 25, 2021 “Under the proposal, starting in 2023, employers with five or more employees would have to...