The Angry Bear

July housing permits and starts: yellow flag for economy in 2022 Last month I noted that, from here on, the comparisons with 2020 in housing would become much more challenging. And so they have. While permits (gold in the graph below) did increase this month, their declining trend remains intact. Starts (blue), and more importantly, single-family permits (red, right scale) – the least volatile measure of all – both decreased again, as they...

Industrial Production Rose 0.9% in July After Prior Four Months Were Revised Higher, RJS at MarketWatch 666 The Fed’s G17 release on Industrial production and Capacity Utilization for July indicated industrial production rose by 0.9% in July after rising by a revised 0.2% in June and a revised 0.8% in May, and is now up 6.6% from a year ago . . . the industrial production index, with the benchmark now set for average 2017 production to equal to...

Prof. Joel Eissenberg: “Zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 remains the most plausible hypothesis” There’s a saying in research science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Given what we know about the origins of nearly all viral pandemics — that they resulted from a virus jumping from an animal to a human host (zoonotic infection)–the null hypothesis for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic should be and was zoonotic. The competing...

A lot more intense economic commentary and detail coming by way of blogger and commenter R.J.S. MarketWatch 666 CPI Rose 0.5% in July on Higher Prices for Food, Energy, New Vehicles and Lodging The consumer price index rose 0.5% in July, as higher prices for food, energy, new vehicles, and lodging at hotels and motels and were only slightly offset by lower prices for car and truck rentals, vehicle insurance and health insurance . . ....

Commenter and Blogger Prof. Joel Eissenberg Beginning early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump, Fox and the right-wing GOP weaponized the disease to sow doubt about science and responsible behaviors. One of the narratives taking hold was that hydroxychloroquine was a cheap, easy and safe cure that scientists were hiding in order to profit from federal dollars for vaccine research.But in the fog of Trumpian fake news, it is easy to forget that there...

Three “Fragment[s] on Machines”: überflüssig ist notwendig An excerpt of a passage from the Grundrisse, in the notorious “fragment on machines,” has become iconic in contemporary Marx studies: Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to...

A Half Century Since The Beginning Of The End Of The Post WW II Economic Order  It was also on a Sunday, with financial markets closed, that August 15, 1971, when US President Richard Nixon gave a surprise address to the nation on economic policy.  He made three announcements: 1) a 90-day wage-price freeze, 2) a10 percent across the board tariff on all imports, and most importantly, 3) the closing of the gold window meaning the US...

Initial claims continue rangebound, while continuing claims continue slow decline, by New Deal Democrat Initial jobless claims declined 12,000 this week to 375,000, still 7,000 above their best pandemic levels of 368,000 set on June 26 and July 10. The 4 week average of claims increased by 1,750 to 396,250, 11,750 above its pandemic low of 384,500 set on July 10: Significant progress in the decline of initial claims remains stalled, as...

Coronavirus dashboard for August 16: some (relatively) “good” news, some bad news Recently I’ve speculated in a few places that Delta may be acting as a backfire-type firebreak against Lamdba, which has been getting a lot of press as potentially evading vaccines. Confirmation that this may in fact be the case comes from Dr. Eric Topol who writes: The Lambda variant is going out like a lamb. (from the hard to find pandemic good news...

Gasoline supplies at a 42 month low; natural gas supplies still 16.5% lower than a year ago; offshore Alaska drilling resumes; Commenter Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 This Week’s Rig Count Number of drilling rigs active in the US increased for the 40th time out of the past 47 weeks during the week ending August 13th, but was still down by 36.9% from the pre-pandemic rig count….Baker Hughes reported that the total count of rotary rigs running in...