The Angry Bear

Oil prices are collapsing as West Texas intermediate is now trading at just over $11/bbl Oil prices move to the point where the marginal supply is profitable or unprofitable. In today’s world the marginal oil supply is US fracked oil. But the economics of fracked oil differs from traditional oil in that the current cost of production is very high as compared to most traditional sources where current costs are relative insignificant and the bulk of the...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 20: a few positive development Here is the update through yesterday (April 19) As usual, significant developments are in italics. Yesterday saw the biggest number of daily tests, and ratio of total vs. positive tests so far, both positive developments.  The number and rate of daily infections and deaths also declined, but that may be a function of lower weekend reporting. Here are yesterday’s numbers. Number and rate of...

The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt.  As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt.  We’ve been through this many times before, and I have nothing to add. I do want to focus on one sentence,...

I want to try to punch above my weight (and be a troll) and contest this Dr. Kathryn Hibbert, director of the medical intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital … said it will take weeks or months to get results and doctors and patients will need to wait for the results of the clinical trials before knowing which Covid-19 patients — if any — should be getting remdesivir. “I think we should be extremely cautious about responding too...

A bit of a post-mortem on my last post.  Andrew Gelman discusses the Santa Clara county study here.  He focuses on sample imbalances, selection bias, and especially the way the authors deal with the specificity of the test.  See his post for the gory details, but he is quite critical of the study, to the point of asking for an apology from the authors for wasting our time: I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time...

(Dan here…I know its long, broad, … but I think it says somethings that need be said.  Another look??) by reader Ken Melvin The Anthropocene and Global Warming Anthropocene: geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Someday, anthropologists and historians will look again at the possible causes of Global Warming. That it was Anthropogenic has long since been recognized, but let them ask...

Abbreviated coronavirus dashboard for April 18 Here is the update through yesterday (April 17) There are some extended comments I want to make about the pandemic, and some graphs comparing States, etc., that are best done separately, so this will be an abbreviated update. Here are yesterday’s numbers. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com) Number: up +35,354 to 706,779 (vs. 35,219 prior peak on April...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The final dominoes among the coincident indicators fell this past week. In the “real economy,” the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is fully priced in. In the stock market . . . I’m scratching my head. As usual, clicking over and reading should not only be informative for you, but tosses me a penny or two for my efforts in bringing...

What the Index of Leading Indicators tells us about the 2020 Presidential election One of the better econometric models that I made use of back in 2016 was that by Prof. Robert S. Erickson of Columbia University and Prof. Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas at Austria, entitled “Forecasting the Presidential Vote with leading economic indicators and the polls” The model takes two steps. First, average the head-to-head heats by the two major...