The Angry Bear

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for October 25 – 29 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There are increasing signs that commodity prices are peaking, the latest candidate – but it may just be noise! – is the price of oil. And if commodity prices are peaking, that gives us some important information that the supply chain bottleneck may be beginning to ease even if just slightly for now. As usual,...

À la recherche du socially necessary labour temps perdu How many Trained Marxists™ know there is no “socially necessary labour time” in the Grundrisse? I didn’t. When researching the provenance of the term, I was surprised to discover that it was present in neither the Grundrisse nor Marx’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. The latter book had a lot of approximations, though, and a pithy disclaimer about what Marx meant — and didn’t...

Coronavirus dashboard for October 27: whither the winter wave, and the trajectory of endemic COVID Well, we got some definite good news yesterday in the FDA approval of vaccines for children ages 5-11. Probably about 1/2 of the 8.5 million children in this age group will be vaccinated by the middle of winter.In the meantime, here is an update on the current status.  The Delta wave, which rolled in like a tsunami, continues to roll out like...

Be aware, this post is choppy. My first point is when was the the Wuhan project defunded. The second point asks why are four Senators then passing bills to defund a project already defunded? And finally I am giving some history such as this research not being gain-of-function. This is Republicans being bad actors and deceiving the public. I am not sure if you remember my post called the Wuhan Readings from the Fauci Files? In it you will see a...

New home sales confirm upturn in housing, while FHFA and Case Shiller suggest increase in house prices is slowing This morning we got three reports on housing sales and prices. Let’s start with the sales data. New home sales, while very noisy and heavily revised, tend to lead all of the other housing indicators, even permits. This morning’s m/m increase in new home sales (blue in the graph below) was good news. It was the second increase in...

“Democrats Introduce Plan To Fix Social Security, the way we fixed the cat,” Commenter and Social Security Expert Dale Coberly assesses the latest plan coming out of Washington DC “Congress has a new plan to fix Social Security. How it would change benefits,” CNBC in the House. Dale was one of the creators of the Northwest Plan which was submitted to Congressman DeFazio who sent Dale Coberly’s Northwest Plan to the Social Security Administration –...

Is Virginia 2021 Election Going To Look More Like 1980, 1994, 2010 Or None Of The Above?, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser, October 26, 2021 In Virginia there is an election for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and the whole House of Delegates, while the State Senate with a slight Dem majority is not up for election, is a week from today on Nov. 2, although early voting has been going on for some time.  The latest polls show a dead heat...

Q3 GDP will show economic contraction? 150+ years of short term interest rate history says no No economic news today, but let me show you one important reason I am not concerned about the supply chain or inflation issues at this point, despite some DOOOMMsaying about a likely punk GDP reading for Q3 that will be reported on Thursday. There is no one foolproof indicator that always has indicated recession in advance. For example, as I have...

My Big Picture It’s a Sunday (Dan here…I put this up late), and it’s been a while since I put up some generalized thoughts on where we are, so let’s update. I’ll go in order of my optimism on the economy, COVID, and the political situation. The economy I am pretty happy about the place the economy is in right now, and for the near term future. Yes, we have inflation and supply chain issues, but we always have issues. And Q3 GDP will...