The Angry Bear

Real spending increases, real income declines in August (Note: I’ll report separately on construction spending and the ISM manufacturing index later.) Real personal income and spending held up well throughout the pandemic, due to a vigorous government response. This morning these were reported for the last full month of any assistance. In nominal terms, personal income rose 0.2%, and spending rose 0.8% (but with a downward revision of -0.4%...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for September 27 – October 1 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Commodity prices and transportation costs continue to soar, and there are even signs of further acceleration. If you go by the regional Fed reports, it is beginning to affect manufacturing. If you go by the ISM, not even a little bit. As usual, clicking over and reading brings you up to the economic...

House prices continue to surge. But maybe . . . Both the FHFA and Case-Shiller house price indexes for July were released this morning. Both showed a continued surge in house prices, with one difference that may be of importance. First, here are both indexes normed to 100 as of January 1991, when the FHFA index began: Both are currently within 2% of an identical 250% increase since then. Further, YoY gains in both continued to...

I don’t know why I’m writing about this when our democracy is on fire.  Maybe I need to focus on something cheery, like climate change. The American Prospect has a couple of pieces up on insurance and climate change.  One identifies a genuine issue, the other misses the mark. In this piece, Alexander Sammon asks why insurance companies aren’t taking steps to fight climate change, given that catastrophes like wildfires and hurricanes cost...

Blogger and Commenter RJS Briefly: even though US Covid infections have been falling since labor day, there’s been anecdotal evidence it’s rising among school age kids . . . at the same time, there are now solid studies showing that the mRNA vaccines administered in the US are losing their effectiveness . . . hence, it looks likely that about the time the holidays roll around, many of those infected kids will be mingling with their vaccinated...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg has a new post up considering people’s immunity to Covid and what it consists of after vaccination. COVID vaccine immunity is waning — how much does that matter? (nature.com), September 17, 2021, Elie Dolgin, We can say circulating antibodies do matter for protection from COVID-19. With the innate immune response, they represent the frontline response in a viral challenge. Often forgotten in the durable immunity...

Always on the back burner, since 2015 on the front, the battle for most ignorant state is being fought across America; well, across a lot of America. If full-scale war should break out, for the most part, the competing armies will not have far to go.

Coronavirus dashboard for September 29: the demographics of disease and death First, let’s start with the good news. The Delta wave continues to roll out just about as swiftly as in rolled in. Cases are down almost 33% nationwide, including in all 4 regions:  And all 5 States that were the worst hit at the outset – AR, FL, LA, MO, and MS – are all continuing to decline. Below I show them, plus RI, which is #25 among the 25 lowest States +...

Does Joe Manchin Believe That Income Inequality Is a Problem?, Horizons, Nancy LeTourneau’s big picture looks at politics and life Nancy was one of the regular writers at Washington Monthly. She had well – written fun reads, some of which I disagreed with in my numerical way. I am a numbers guy. The editors of Washington Monthly decided to change the format and brought in a cadre of writers who replaced Nancy, the Longmans, Atkins and others....