The Angry Bear

New jobless claims stall, adding to the evidence that stalling vaccinations and case counts are having an economic effect New jobless claims have been the most important weekly economic datapoint this year, as they have correlated strongly with vaccination progress. Unfortunately, that progress has largely stalled in the past month, and now new jobless claims appear to have stalled as well. This week new jobless claims declined 7,000 to...

Real personal income and spending both decline in May – but that’s OK, as it was mainly expiration of stimulus; NBER likely to declare end of recession soon The last of the 4 monthly coincident markers for whether the economy is in recession vs. expansion was reported this morning for May. Let’s take a look. Personal income declined -2.0% in nominal terms, which on top of April’s decline of -13.1%, has taken back most, not by no means all, of...

Living the Big Lie In the more insular areas of the red states, of all the states, some have been saying, thinking, and believing like Marjorie Taylor Greene since forever. In these areas, this narrative of Marjorie’s wasn’t unusual to the local ear; neither was what Trump was saying. Trump’s election in 2016, accorded the narrative the presidential seal of approval. Henceforth his election, Marjorie felt free to say these things to the world...

If vaccinations are available, then one should get the vaccine. Briefly . . . Mildly Ill Young COVID-19 Patients Report Lasting Symptoms, MedScape More than half of young adults with mild COVID-19 who self-isolated at home were still reporting troublesome after-effects six months later, a study from Norway published in Nature Medicine found. The study included 312 COVID-19 survivors over age 16, with illnesses of varying severity....

2 Months PCE Would Add 7.36 Percentage Points to Q2 GDP Angry Bear Commenter RJS and Marketwatch 666 blogger computes the impact of real PCE from this report on GDP and explains his math. The May report Personal Income and Outlays from the Bureau of Economic Analysis gives us nearly half the data that will go into 2nd quarter GDP, since it gives us 2 months of data on our personal consumption expenditures (PCE), which accounts for nearly 70%...

Justice Dept. Will Toughen Rules for Seizing Lawmakers’ Data, Garland Says (msn.com) The Justice Department will tighten its rules for when law enforcement officials may seize information about members of Congress and their aides, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said on Monday amid a backlash to the disclosure of a 2018 subpoena that swept in data from the Apple accounts of Democratic lawmakers and staff. What Ilhan Omar Actually Said – The...

Frequent commenter Professor of  Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Joel Eissenberg discusses history of vaccinations and the need to be vaccinated. Why everyone needs to get vaccinated.Infectious diseases beset all living things, even bacteria. In the past ten thousand years of human history, there have been epidemics and pandemics of plague, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera and other diseases, with millions of deaths. Herd immunity was achieved...

TimeWork Web Reloaded Publication of my article, “The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred,” felt very much like the culmination of a 26-year long research project that began when I answered a call for proposals from the B.C. Ministry of Employment and Investment. My proposal included a research hub website, which was pretty innovative for 1995. It turns out that no research contract was...

Yves Smith is back at Naked Capitalism, having been out for medical reasons. Angry Bear and I wish her well in recouping and rehabbing. An Introduction; At Naked Capitalism, Yves posted a commentary from September 2018 on the topic of “Privilege.” Intertwined with her experience as a child growing up in factory-dominated towns to what is being experienced in the South – Alabama . . . where she now resides. Although a college town, it is a...