The Angry Bear

Jobless claims: continued slow progress A quick note about the first report of Q3 GDP released this morning: the rebound is only about 2/3’s of the decline from last year. We are still about 3.5% below that number. On a *relative* basis, this was a “good” number, but on an absolute basis, this is still quite depressed. This week’s new jobless claims continued to decline further below 800,000, and continued claims also made a new pandemic low. On a...

Steve Hutkins at Save The Post Office In response to several inquiries from members of Congress, the Office of Inspector General has issued a report on “Operational Changes to Mail Delivery.” The report discusses the Postal Service’s plan to eliminate 64 million work hours — the equivalent of 33,000 jobs — by implementing 57 cost-cutting initiatives. As discussed in this previous post, the plan represents one of the largest downsizing efforts in the...

Personal income and spending both surprisingly continued to increase in September, plus a note on GDP Yesterday the first estimate of Q3 GDP was reported. Since this report includes 2 long leading indicators, it gives us insight into what the economy might be like in the 2nd half of next year. I have a post on that up at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over and reading should be informative for you, and it rewards me a little bit for my efforts....

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Coronavirus dashboard for October 27: The EU is now worse than the US Total US confirmed infections: 8,777,432* Average US infections last 7 days: 71,833 (new record high) Total US deaths: 226,695 Average US deaths last 7 days: 806 (vs. recent low of 689 11 days ago) *I suspect the real number is about 15,000,000, or 4.5% of the total US population Source: COVID Tracking Project The pandemic is once again raging out of control in parts of the country,...

The Philosophy That Makes Amy Coney Barrett So Dangerous, NYT, Erwin Chemerinsky, October 2020, Opinion Piece If I did not know this man personally, I would have never looked to him for help and also advice from time to time.  It was only through a friend I wrote with at the old Slate site, I had the chance to meet him. Professor Chemerinsky discusses the dangers of applying an originalism interpretation of the US Constitution. There is not much I can add...

Abolish The Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence (ODNI)  A sign that this entity should be abolished, and I mean really gone, done in, not with its parts redistributed to other entities, is that it is an an entity defined by its director, not itself.  In preparing to write this post I checked on it, and I thought it was the ONI, the Office of National Intelligence. But, no, it is the ODNI, spelled out as above, really. And it should go. Why...

An Irony About Interest Rates And Income Distribution  It has long been a truism of economics that high-interest rates were favored by wealthy capitalist lenders against poor borrowers, with such a view lying behind the populist demands of the late 19th century.  We are used to applauding Keynes’s forecast of the “euthanasia of the rentiers.” But now that such a situation is upon us of increasingly likely very low-interest rates for a long time ahead,...

Or one would think so, given people resist wearing a mask, social distancing and they want to party like its 1999. Song written in 1982  .  .  .   “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I only want you to have some fun,” Covid. [embedded content]Melissa Jeltsen, Huffpost: “The U.S. has entered an ominous new surge of the coronavirus pandemic, with more cases reported on Friday (10/23/20) than any other day since the crisis began in March. And yet, in many areas...