The Angry Bear

New home sales continue rebound in August, as price increases continue slight deceleration Housing is a long leading sector of the economy, and new home sales, while very noisy and heavily revised, tend to lead all of the other housing indicators. [Note: FRED hasn’t updated its charts with this morning’s information, so graphs below do not show this month]. So this morning’s m/m increase in new home sales was good news. It was an 8 month...

Angry Bear’s Mike Smith; I am a little baffled by our governments assessment of agriculture. Just today they released a few details about paying farmers to plant cover crop, as per this article here. House Budget Plan Offers Big Injection of Funds in USDA Conservation Programs House Budget Plan Offers Big Injection of Funds in USDA Conservation Programs (dtnpf.com), Progressive Farmer OMAHA (DTN) — Farmers would get up to $25 an acre from the...

As a subscriber to Professor Heather Cox – Richardson’s “Letters From An American,” I have access to each daily article. And as a follow up to yesterday’s “Letters From An American,” today’s, September 23, 2021 submission gives additional detail to the amount of effort made to subvert the January 6th certification of the election by Congress. As detailed in this edition, there were four distinct players or Trump staff who laid much of the...

New Housing Starts and Building Permits Rose in August on Increased Apartment Construction, Commenter and Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 Microsoft Word – newresconst_auto_text_202108.docx (census.gov), The August report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau indicated that their widely watched estimate of new housing units that were started during the month was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,615,000, which was...

Online Voting  Yes, a wonderful innovation!!!  No, I had not heard of this before, although maybe somebody reading this had encountered it.  So, where is this fabulous innovation being adopted?  Why Mother Russia!  So polls showed the United Russia Party that supports Vladimir Putin getting only 30% support for the Duma election that just happened.  But while I have not seen specific numbers, it is my understanding that they have been reelected as...

“Bungling The Debt Ceiling,” EconoSpeak, Barkley Rosser It looks like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is bungling the matter of raising (or suspending) the debt ceiling, coming due in mid-October supposedly. He could have tied it to reconciliation in August, but decided not to, intent on getting GOPster on board with participating in doing it. But Sen. McConnell (R-KY) is having none of it, and even though Schumer thought he had them by tying it to a...

“Global oil shortage at 2.77 million barrels per day in August as OPEC, Output falls short of quota by 684,000 barrels per day,” Commenter and Blogger, RJS, Focus on Fracking OPEC’s Monthly Oil Market Report “The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA”  Monday of this week saw the release of OPEC’s September Oil Market Report, which covers OPEC & global oil data for August, and hence it gives us a picture of the global oil...

“Letters From An American,” September 22, 2021, Professor Heather Cox-Richardson Continuing Professor Heather Cox – Richardson’s detailing the events before and after President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. It gets more interesting as a Federalist lawyer details instructions for Vice President Pence to follow and dissolve, reject, etc. the Electoral Vote Certification on January 6, 2021. How does an attorney advocate the...

Coronavirus dashboard for September 22: the Delta wave rolls out?   At last, it appears that the Delta wave may be receding, as for now, the US is on a definite downslope in cases. As of yesterday, the US recorded 135,000 cases, a 31,000 decrease from the peak only 20 days before: Deaths have continued to rise but may peak out below the 2400 level I identified previously as the low end of the range for a likely top by the end of this...