The Angry Bear

Top 100 Economics Blogs & Websites To Follow in 2021 Feedspot has a team of over 25 experts whose goal is to discover and rank popular blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels in several niche categories. With millions of blogs on the web, finding influential bloggers in a niche industry is a hard problem to address. Our experience leads us to believe that a thoughtful combination of both algorithmic and human editing offers the best means of...

Construction Spending Falls 0.3% in May after March & April Spending Revised Higher, Commenter RJS, Marketwatch 666 The Census Bureau report on construction spending for May (pdf) estimated that May’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,545.3 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.3 percent (±1.0 percent)* below the revised annualized estimate of $1,549.5 billion of construction spending in...

June data starts out mixed: manufacturing strong, housing stalls, New Deal democrat June data started out this morning with the ISM manufacturing report. There was no big change from last month’s torrid pace. The overall index declined a very slight -0.6% to 60.6, while the leading new orders component declined by 1 to 66:Any number over 60 implies a very strong economy, so this report indicates that the manufacturing sector is still red hot....

June jobs report: a tale of two very different surveys – but both far from full recovery  HEADLINES: 850,000 jobs added. Of these, 662,000 were private sector jobs, and 188,000 were government jobs, chiefly in education. The alternate, and more volatile measure in the household report indicated a gain of only 128,000 jobs, which factors into the unemployment and underemployment rates below.The total number of employed is still 6,764,000, or...

Farmer-economist Michael Smith comments from More Random News Events of the Week post ________ My comment on the open thread, “what exactly does the federal government plan to do this is a little mind boggling. The USDA is limited in the resources they have. They can provide grants but it would need congress to fund it.” A few things I am working through in the consideration of carbon capture: 1. How much is enough? My operation requires...

Gotta give credit where credit is due. If not for my morning readings at other sites, I would not have run across this gem at Crooks and Liars as done by Chris capper Liebenthal. This gentleman, ahh redneck, paints the situation a bit differently than what I or other more learned (than I) people might do having a tendency to speak in elegant, technical, and formal verbiage. It is said plain and simple in this case. Now if you can not stand a few...

New jobless claims: a surprise to the positive side I have been paying particular attention to new jobless claims this year, as being the most important weekly economic datapoint to correlate with vaccination progress. My ultimate target for claims is an average of 325,000 or below, which would signify a return to normal expansion levels in the past 30 years. Lasts week I wrote that “Unfortunately, that progress [in vaccinations] has largely...

Karl Marx did not use the phrase, socially necessary labour time (or its equivalent, labour time [that is] socially necessary) in the Grundrisse (1857-58 notebooks). He did, however, refer once to “the necessary labour of society”: As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The...

PhD geneticist and molecular biologist Joel Eissenberg discussing CRISPR results. — “A watershed moment in modern medicine,” says genetics expert The promise of gene therapy may finally be realized. I’ve been a PhD geneticist and molecular biologist for nearly 40 years. During that time, I’ve seen the cloning of many human genes for which inherited diseases were known (e.g., cystic fibrosis, Huntingtons, Duchenne/Becker muscular dystrophy)....