The Angry Bear

#TangPing (“lying flat”) China’s new ‘tang ping’ trend aims to highlight pressures of work culture (from BBC) Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by “lying flat”. The new trend, known as “tang ping”, is described as an antidote to society’s pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts. China has a shrinking labour...

 – by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 31 – June 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. On the one hand, it’s amazing just how positive the indicators are almost across the board – including long term Treasuries getting relaxed about the inflation scare. On the other hand, the surge in commodity prices looks like it’s about to bite corporate profits in the rear quadrant. Also, I’ve tried out...

Ross Barnett didn’t invent the big lie, but he was a practitioner. One might even say that Ross was to the manor born. The big lie had been a southern thing from the get go; comes with the turf. First you must lie to yourself, and so they did. Hitler appropriated, without acknowledgment, the concept in Mein Kampf, Chapter 10. That wasn’t all he appropriated from the American South; they had beaten him to a lot of the Nazi shtick. Joseph McCarthy...

Why the reference to the wings in re the two major political parties? Are we being asked to envision either of our two major political parties as a bird, an aircraft. If so, each would surely have two matching wings, one on either side of the body/fuselage. Maybe they meant to make an analogy with the sides of an aisle in a room, or the banks of a river as in rive gauche or rive droite, or to those seated on the far left hand side of the room or on...

May jobs report: almost all positive, but not good enough HEADLINES: 559,000 jobs added: 492,000 private sector plus 67,000 government. The alternate, and more volatile measure in the household report indicated a gain of 444,000 jobs, which factors into the unemployment and underemployment rates below.The total number of employed is still 7,629,000, or 5.0% below its pre-pandemic peak.  At the rate jobs have grown this year, it will take...

New jobless claims continue strong decline, consistent with ongoing recovery, while continuing claims continue mixed New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic datapoint, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic – deaths are at their lowest point in over a year, and new infections at their lowest points since the onset of the pandemic.  Several weeks...

My Latest Book Heck, I might as well brag here when I have the opportunity, and I do.   So, just a couple of days ago my latest book came out from Springer Nature.  It is called Foundations and Applications of Complexity Economics.  I am not going to go on about it or its contents other than to note that I have published on this general topic before on numerous occasions, with my last book out on it a decade ago in 2011, also from Springer.  ...

May manufacturing continues white hot; April construction spending shows signs of being constrained by materials and costs It’s the first of the month, which means we get our first look at May data in the form of the ISM manufacturing index, as well as April construction spending. The questions we are looking for information to answer from these two leading sectors of the economy, manufacturing and residential construction, are: (1) is the...