The Angry Bear

Steve Hutkins at Save The Post Office continues his dialogue on planned changes to USPS operations with one change amongst the others resulting in later deliveries of first class mail. The Washington Post was the first to report on this change as well as other changes. You may be able to catch portions of Louis DeJoy’s planned changes at other sources as well. Congressional Action: The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has just posted...

New home sales rise m/m, but signal caution for housing market going forward New home sales increased to a three month annualized high of 923,000 in January. This is of a piece with the positive news last week on housing permits. At the same time, the pace remains below the recent high of 979,000 annualized set six months ago in July. The below graph compares housing starts (blue) with the much less volatile single family permits (red) and the...

With all the crap, trump has said in tweeting over 4 years which equates to > 20,000 tweets  via “Wiki,” I find it to be infantile and a double standard for Manchin, Collins, and Romney to call Neera Tandern out for her tweets. Where were they over the last 4 years of trump, hiding from him perhaps? Joe Manchin has a bone to pick with Neera Tanden And its personal. The background; “Office of Management and Budget director nominee Neera...

Initial jobless claims: it appears that the worst of the winter 2020-21 increase is behind us Let me start off this week’s review of initial jobless claims by pre-debunking something I am sure is going to be said elsewhere: a lack of reporting in Texas did *not* appreciably skew this week’s numbers. Applying the same workaround I did for Hurricanes Sandy and Harvey, I.e., subtracting the affected State’s data from the unadjusted number, to see how...

Tags: open thread

Steve Hutkins at Save the Post Office Continued discussions between the mailers who are faced with higher rates, PMG Louis DeJoy, and Congress. The mailers are in court as we read Steve’s excellent review of what is taking place. Also, PMG DeJoy has plans of increased prices for mailers also includes slower service and higher prices for First Class mail. The February 12th edition of the Washington Post exposed the PMG plans to...

Has Elon Musk Damaged His Portfolio By Buying Bitcoin?  After tweeting repeatedly for some time about bitcoin and the originally satirical degecoin, both of which have gone up massively in the past year, on Feb. 8 Elon Musk put his money where his mouth had been and had his Tesla EV company buy about $1.5 billion in bitcoin.  The immediate aftermath of this was a substantial surge of the crypto from somewhat over $40,000 to somewhat over...

It isn’t that no one cares what you think, they probably don’t, it is that what you think doesn’t really matter. Chances are that what you think, you didn’t; didn’t think that is. Even if you did, it doesn’t matter because facts are facts, and facts don’t care. Facts just are. Feel free to think, to opine, about the unknown, to believe what you want, but facts are reality and can be known. Facts couldn’t care less what you learned at mother’s, or...

Coronavirus dashboard for February 23: vaccinations start to have a dramatic effect Totals US deaths, Cases, vaccinated one dose and two doses: – Coronavirus confirmed deaths: 500,310 – Confirmed infections: 28,190,159 – One Dose vaccinations: 44,138,118, and – Two Dose vaccinations: 19,438,495. The good news is, roughly 9.5% of the US population age 18 or over has received both doses of a vaccine. Over 20% has received at least...

Commenter and writer RJS describes himself as “unencumbered by education, affiliations, beliefs or agenda and im not advocating anything.” Market Watch 666 The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 1.3% in January, as prices for finished wholesale goods were on average 1.4% higher, while margins of final services providers increased by 1.3%  .  .  .  that followed a revised December report that now shows the PPI was...