The Angry Bear

New jobless claims continue to decline, just above the pandemic low New jobless claims are likely to the most important weekly economic data for the next 3 to 6 months. They are going to tell us whether my suspicion that, as a critical mass of those vaccinated is reached, there will be a veritable surge in renewed commercial and social activities and attendant consumer spending, leading in turn to a strong rebound in monthly employment gains...

 –by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Although rising long term interest rates are likely to have consequences in 2022, 2021 is shaping up to be a blowout year for economic (and hopefully employment) growth, driven by dual huge monetary and fiscal stimuli. As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you up to the figurative moment, and reward me...

“To Tackle Inequality, We Need to Start Talking About Where Wealth Comes From,” Evonomics, Laurie Macfarlane, March 13, 2021 Do people in Britain resent the rich? According to two new studies published this week, the answer to this question is: “not really.” The studies, one commissioned by Trust for London and another by Tax Justice UK, explore public attitudes towards wealth based on focus groups held across England. Both found that most...

“How The Humanities Building Went Wrong” Or Does Brutalist Architecture Represent Fascist “Institutionalized Tyranny”?  My freshly arrived Spring 2021 issue of “On Wisconsin,” the alumni magazine of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has an article whose title is the first part of the title above in quotation marks.  The later quotation marks phrase appears in the article, but not the word “fascism.” The article is about a famous but much...

https://angrybearblog.com/2020/04/tip-of-the-iceberg#more-56219 The US spent $Billions to help Columbia stem the flow of cocaine. Why not spent a few $Billions to alleviate the poverty and social unrest produced by Climate change in El Salvador? Why not spend a few $Trillion to slow, then reverse Climate Change? —The Biden Administration is faced with a problem of asylum seekers at the southern border. The problem was there before, and before...

I was told this by someone years ago. We tried to do this and were not to successful in the fifties. March Madness comment below. Sen. Whitehouse: Dark Money Behind GOP Judges Is Now Behind Voter Suppression | Crooks and Liars, Aliza Worthington, March 13, 2021 “Sen. Whitehouse chairs a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee that deals with oversight of the federal courts, and now that the Democrats are in charge, he is taking full...

February consumer inflation begins to heat up a little Seasonally adjusted consumer prices rose 0.4% in February. As a result, over the past several months there has been a significant uptick in YoY inflation to 1.7% from 1.1% in November.  Aside from the pandemic, for the past 40 years, recessions had happened when CPI less energy costs (red) had risen to close to or over 3%/year, usually driven by increases in the price of oil by more than...

January JOLTS report: during the wintertime pandemic surge, hiring hit a brick wall Yesterday morning’s JOLTS report for January was confirmatory of the weak jobs report for that month, showing a largely paused recovery. Further, for the second month in a row, hires were down sharply. Let’s examine this in accord with the data from the prior two recoveries covered by this report, which has only a 20-year history. In the two past recoveries:...

William Godwin’s ethic of leisure and the riddle of social justice In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) William Godwin declared, “the object, in the present state of society, is to multiply labour; in another state, it will be to simplify it.” In The Enquirer (1797), he affirmed, “[t]he genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with a disposition to improve it. All other riches are of petty and inconsiderable value. Is there...