The Angry Bear

Housing sales decline, while price surges continue So I take a little one-day road trip on my vacation and come back to find much weeping and gnashing of teeth and generalized whining about a big decline in new home sales. Well, what exactly were they expecting? The new home sales data is particularly volatile and heavily revised. So, in June, it was volatile, and May was revised substantially downward (blue in the graph below). Prices also...

RJS, MarketWatch 666, New Housing Starts Reported Higher in June, Building Permits 5.3% Lower The June report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that new housing units were being started at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,643,000 in June, which was 6.3 percent (±11.5 percent)* above the revised May estimated annual rate of 1,546000 units started, and was 29.1 percent (±11.2 percent) above last June’s pace...

Commenter and Blogger R.J.S. brings the latest on Natural Gas and the impact on it from the heat wave. Focus on Fracking blogspot Natural gas prices rose every day this week in surging to a new 31 month high, as yet another continental heat wave loomed…after ending last week unchanged at $3.674 per mmBTU as strong export demand offset cooler weather and a bearish storage report, the contract price of natural gas for August delivery opened the week...

Comments on existing home sale prices Existing home sales were reported yesterday. Since, although they are about 90% of the market, they have much less effect on the economy than new home sales, I normally don’t pay that much attention.But I did want to emerge from my vacation hideaway to make a few comments. 1. Inventory is up 11% YoY. Inventory follows prices, and as prices rise, more and more people decide now is a good time to sell...

Tags: open thread

I am adding a brief comment here (it fits and is on topic) rather than going back to the earlier post which I believe to be titled correctly; “Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry.” As my source of information I had identified two different articles taken from Modern Healthcare and also MedPage Today. Both I read religiously and from both I get email notifications. My three points to my titling are as follows:...

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. No visible impact on the economy yet due to the Delta wave. In March 2020, the first indicator to tip over was restaurant reservations. I would expect that to be the first item to suffer now as well. As usual, clicking over and reading will not only bring you up to the virtual moment, but bring me a penny or two...

Farmer – Economist Michael Smith is discussing how people get into farming and the issues. There are three ways to get into faming, each with their own issues, pitfalls, and nuances. There are three distinct ways to get into farming and those paths are all not worn at all. After a few rainy and hot weeks of watching the Top Gear guy farm his land he previously was subbing out, he now wants to argue with his wife about Cartel Avocados, and...

In 1955, just past daybreak, a Chevrolet truck pulled up to an unmarked building. A 14-year-old child was in the back. The article is part of “Inheritance,” a project about American history and Black life.. It is a good offering by The Atlantic, “His Name Was Emmett Till,” Wright Thompson Depicted is the Barn where Emmet Till was strung up, beaten, and murdered on August, 28, 1955, What We Still Don’t Know About Emmett Till’s Murder – The...

New jobless claims rise sharply; is the Delta wave beginning to take its economic toll? New jobless claims are the most important weekly economic datapoint with regard to the effects of vaccination progress. At this point, it is also a test of how much the “delta wave” of new cases is setting economic progress back. Three weeks I wrote that, because progress in vaccinations had largely stalled, “that implies at least a stall in the decline in...