The Angry Bear

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That’s easy, First, there had to be a market. Without a market, no matter how good the idea, how well capitalized the enterprise, how competent the management team, or how skilled the workforce; there can be no business. So, where do markets come from? Markets seem to come in three forms. They may be found in plain sight, they may be hidden in a forest of commerce, or they may be foreseen and realized only by...

Coronavirus dashboard for September 2: Trumpism still kills Total US cases: 6,073,840 Cases, 7 day average: 42,304 Total US deaths: 184,604 Deaths, 7 day average: 888 Source: COVID Tracking Project US cases by region: US deaths by region: Superficially, this looks somewhat promising, as both cases and deaths have declined. But note that cases have flattened in the past week or so without further declines. This is particularly of concern, because...

August jobs report: continued slow incremental progress HEADLINES: 1,371,000 million jobs gained. The gains since May total about 48% of the 22.1 million job losses in March and April. The alternate and more volatile measure in the household report was 3,756,000 jobs gained, which factors into the unemployment and underemployment rates below. U3 unemployment rate fell -1.8% from 10.2% to 8.4%, compared with the January low of 3.5%. U6 underemployment...

Initial and continuing claims: very slow “less worse” progress continues The continued good news in this Thursday morning’s jobless claims report is that the trend of “less worse” news is intact. But the improvement has slowed dramatically and is still at a level of about 150,000 higher than the worst weekly levels of the Great Recession. On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, new jobless claims rose (slightly) by 7,591 from their pandemic low last week to...

Should We Fear A Reappearance Of Inflation?  In today’s Washington Post Robert J. Samuelson has raised the possibility that the Federal Reserve may be setting the US up for a reappearance of inflation.  He invoked the 1960s and 1970s when supposedly the Fed allowed inflation to get out of control out of a supposedly misguided effort to bring down unemployment by allowing successive small increases in inflation. Supposedly the newly released report on...

No one seems to know what or who Antifa is; so far be it from me to pretend that I do. I did meet a self-avowed one once. Interviewed the young man for 30-45 minutes; even talked on the phone a few minutes with his parents who lived in Oakland. By way of providing context; this was during the Occupy Wall Street protests in Oakland, CA. Down from Portland, OR, he was looking for a place to stay for ‘up to a week’. Twitchy, desperate, and vague, …, fits the...

PMG Louis DeJoy’s Fix for the Post Office, Mark Jamison, Save The Post Office, Aug. 29, 2020 After years of being a journalistic backwater the Postal Service is all over the news. From the usual contextually vacant reports about financial losses, we shifted to meaty and sometimes sensational coverage about the removal of Blue collections boxes and mail processing equipment at plants. There’s also the entrance of a new villain on the scene, Louis DeJoy, a...

CDC tells states: Be ready to distribute vaccines on Nov. 1, Modern Healthcare, September 2, 2020 The federal government told states to prepare for a coronavirus vaccine to be ready to distribute by Nov. 1; from which the declaration of the early timeline raised concern among public health experts about the  “October surprise” of a vaccine approval and use being driven by political considerations ahead of a presidential election, rather than science. The...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]It is said the Postal Service is mired in debt, that it is unsustainable, a burden to the American people. This is the position of the current postmaster general, supported by the board of governors who hired him and by a treasury secretary who seems to be the chief architect of the current assault on […]