The Angry Bear

Manufacturing still red hot; construction still very cool Our first November data is out this morning with the forward-looking ISM manufacturing report for October, as well as construction spending for October. Let’s take the ISM report first, since it is an important short leading indicator for the production sector, and in particular its new orders subindex. In November the index rose slightly from 60.8 to 61.1, as did the more leading...

RIP David M. Grether  I have only just now learned that Dave Grether died on Sept. 12 of causes unreported at age 82. He was an emeritus prof of econ at Cal Tech.  He received his PhD in 1969 from Stanford in econometrics. He soon was at Cal Tech where he spent the rest of his career, soon becoming an early figure in experimental economics, co-authoring papers with a colleague, Charles Plott, whom many think should have shared the Nobel Prize with...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 29 – December 3 at Seeking Alpha My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. After a long time of very few if any weekly changes among the indicators, there were three changes this week, and several other indicators that are close to changing as well. Or, as the title to this week’s post says, there are “changes afoot.” As usual, not only will clicking over and reading bring...

Wednesday, 1 December 2021, the state of Mississippi argued before the US Supreme Court that the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision [410 U.S. 113 (1973)] giving women a constitutional right to have an abortion was in error; that it should be overturned. During Wednesday’s oral arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked Mississippi’s Solicitor Stewart whether Mississippi’s challenge was premised on religious grounds. No doubt about that. In Missouri, Alabama,...

Disposable time as a common-pool resource I — Introduction About a decade ago, I wrote a short piece about “labour power as a common-pool resource” that got picked up by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and led to me being invited to a conference on the commons in Berlin put on by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. I would now like to amend that to regard disposable time as the common-pool resource in question. Much of my original rationale applies...

Clear signs of *deceleration* in house price increases, but no sign of actual declines yet The veritable explosive increase in house prices has been one of the biggest economic stories of the past year. And because it feeds into “owner’s equivalent rent” with a lag, is likely to have a big effect on consumer inflation readings in next year as well. This morning both the FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes were reported for September, and...

by Joseph Joyce The Return of FDI Last year’s collapse in foreign direct investment was seen by many as the first stage of a period of retrenchment. Political pressure to “reshore” production, particularly of goods of national importance such as medical equipment, would cause multinational firms to rearrange their global supply chains to minimize foreign exposure. The data released for FDI in the first half of this year shows that in fact,...

I think every word of Matthew Yglesias’s post on Omicron, Omar Bradley, and why the hell aren’t we investing in pandemic prevention is brilliant. I think it is publicly available (I didn’t pay) and advise just clicking the link. For those who ignored the above advice, I would like to focus on two main points First he argues that we should invest in the capacity to make large amounts of vaccines against currently unkown viruses. This...

“Slow Boring” is Matthew Yglesias’s substack. I don’t subscribe. It’s about the money. I can afford it, but I don’t like the fact that Matthew Yglesias makes so much money. I am extremely envious. I admit it. I think this is a very very common problem. Many people have asked Matthew Yglesias how he makes people so angry. I guess that they too are jealous. Also the text “Slow Boring” is brilliant snark. It is a reference to Weber saying...