The Angry Bear

Blockbuster January retail sales presage gains in jobs (Dan here…late posting) [NOTE: I’ll report separately on industrial production later this morning. Real retail sales is my bellwether for the health of the consumer. And after 3 months of declines, we got a huge upturn in January. Before adjusting for inflation, retail sales jumped 5.3% – not annually, 5.3% in one month! After adjusting for inflation, sales were up 5.0%, to a new all-time...

Angrybearblog December 22,2020 “Eyeballing, the first shot looks 80-90% effective.” (Moderna) and “my guess is that the first shot was about 90% effective over this period.” (Pfizer). Angrybearblog December 24,2020 New England Journal of Medicine February 17 2021 We used documents submitted to the Food and Drug Administration2 to derive the vaccine efficacy beginning from 2 weeks after the first dose to before the second dose...

Tags: open thread

Industrial production continues strong growth If real retail sales (reported on in the prior post) is the best proxy for the health of the consumer, Industrial production, the King of Coincident Indicators, is the same for production.  And the news there was also very good. Overall production rose 0.9% in December, and the manufacturing component rose 1.0%. As a result, overall production is only -1.9% below its level just before the pandemic...

Something is funky with our comment function. They are showing up at the WP site, just not showing here today. Though, sometimes you might see them, then not. So, leave a comment. We’ll get it happening. By now, you are aware that the problem Texas is having is because they failed to build their system to withstand cold/winter weather. That is the mechanical reason for their problem. Of course, this leads many to assume that as soon as it...

Steve Hutkins at Save The Post Office, The 2020 Mail Delays: Stats & Charts Preface The inventor of MRPII, Oliver Wight, coined a term for management deliberately obstructing the implementation of MRPII calling them “Cement Heads.” In Louis DeJoy’s case, rather than work with today’s postal system; DeJoy is deliberately sabotaging it with his changes. The end result will lead to its demise and subsequent takeover by private enterprise....

On the effects of COVID vaccination, Israel is the bellwether  I’m beginning to see some clickbait reports of COVID diagnoses after two doses of the vaccine, together with breathless reporting by some RW’ers and LW’ers that the vaccines are not very effective. I’m here to tell you to beware of these headlines and reports. For example, here is a report out of Oregon that 4 people were diagnosed with COVID after their second doses of vaccine....

Initial and continued jobless claims: signs that the worst of the pandemic related layoffs may be behind us Some – very relative – good news in unemployment claims this week. It looks like the recent increase in new claims has peaked, while continued claims continue to decline. With new daily infections, still horrible at 100,000/day, only 40% of their 250,000/day peak, and vaccinations slowly increasing near 1.5 million/day, we may have seen the...

AB currently uses a WordPress comment system which has been problematic. As a result, I have been researching other plug-in systems when readers have asked about functionality not available in WP. The Disqus system seems to have the functionality that was requested (may be dependent upon web browser being used). An ad-free version can also be purchased for a yearly fee. Does anyone have experience with Disqus (Washington Monthly uses Disqus)?...

The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon, Osita Nwanevu, staff writer, The New Republic. We are smarter than they are or at least better educated or are we? Commenter Dale Coberly: I am offering this post to AB because I have seen a great deal of “us smart, them dumb” in comments.  I might agree with part of that,  but it’s bad politics and dangerous self-deception.  Rather than just post a “read this” with link...