The Angry Bear

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for September 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Despite the fact that Delta has been almost as bad as last winter’s wave of infections, which was the worst to date, and has been almost as bad in terms of deaths as the first wave that hit the NYC area hard, it has had almost no effect on the economy, and in particular consumer behavior. In the longer term,...

August retail sales rebound slightly, argue for continued strong jobs growth in autumn Let’s take a look at retail sales, which are perhaps my favorite monthly economic indicator, since they tell us so much about average consumer behavior, and are also a good short leading indicator for jobs.Nominally retail sales increased 0.7% for August, after a -0.6% downward revision to -1.7% for July.  Since consumer prices rose 0.3% in August, real...

And heading South out of Denver into the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico. Get to “Dan” for issues and problems. More on healthcare when I settle in tonight, Doing some deeper dives into Biden’s ACA modifications, Medicare, and Jayapal’s Bill. Have to split them apart otherwise it would be as long as the opioid’s post. You should read the long Purdue – opioid post, if you have not. I layout the time line of when Purdue introduced...

Jobless claims continue in normal mid-cycle range Last week I encouraged readers to take the very low jobless claims number with a grain of salt due to Labor Day artifacts, and see if the big reduction was maintained or reversed this week. This week did indeed reverse the pattern somewhat, but not enough to interfere with the overall declining trend.Initial claims rose 20,000 to 332,000, while the 4-week average declined 4,250 to 335,750, the...

So, Whatever Happened To The Arizona Fraudit?  Even though these “audits” are now apparently spreading to other states, notably Pennsylvania and maybe Wisconsin, efforts to somehow find election fraud in the presidential elections in those states in 2020, there is an odd thing that has happened that has basically dropped off the media radar screen. That is what the outcome of the initial one of these is, the “fraudit” in Arizona, authorized and...

“The Justice Department moved on Thursday to block a bankruptcy plan that grants broad legal immunity to the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, whose drug OxyContin has been at the heart of the nation’s opioid epidemic. William K. Harrington, the U.S. trustee for the Justice Department, filed a motion in federal court to halt confirmation of the settlement while the department appeals the judge’s decision to approve the deal. In writing...

Debt Ceiling Nonsense Yet Again – A Catch 22?  Of course, there should be no debt ceiling.  The US is the only nation to have one for absolute amounts of money (some other nations have ones tied to percents of budgets, and so forth). Even though it is nonsensical and absurd, it has been around for over a century, a recrudescence of a deal to get funding approved by Congress for WW I in the wake of the passage in 1913 of the new amendment allowing...

Tags: open thread

The events are akin to the film Seven Days In May with a role reversal detailing a rogue General instead of President. Seven Days in May begins with a riot in front of the White House. It’s the late 1960s and U.S. President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has recently signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Now, demonstrators for and against the treaty are coming to blows. The populace is afraid. The military-industrial complex...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Arguably *the* transformative scientific innovation of the past two years was the development and deployment of mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. But like any innovation, there is a long unsung history, with lots of players nobody heard of. Since the Nobel Prize in Medicine is likely to go to mRNA vaccines next month, there’s plenty of chatter about who will be named (maximum of three)....