The Angry Bear

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 14 – 18 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. With the coronavirus beginning to rage out of control again in a majority of US States, improvement in the coincident and short leading indicators has generally halted. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the moment, and bring me a penny or two. ...

Truth Is The Daughter Of Time This is a frontispiece to a 1951 mystery novel by Josephine Tey (real name: Elizabeth Makintosh) named _The Daughter of Time_It is about the question of whether or not King Richard III ordered the murder of the “Little Princes in the Tower,” his nephews Edward and Richard, as has  long been alleged, and for a long time was simply accepted as historical fact.  This bestselling and very well and wittily written novel makes...

(Dan here…a note for reality) Full liability release for businesses and hospitals It’s necessary, Mitch McConnell and his colleagues say, because of a “flood” of frivolous lawsuits crushing businesses and threatening economic recovery. So it’s important to say this clearly and out loud: there is no crisis of COVID-19 litigation. It’s made-up, it doesn’t exist, it’s a ploy to get businesses out of paying for compliance. That’s entirely it. We have all the...

A month ago, when the public health community was warning about the dangers of premature opening and our reality show President was turning mask-wearing into a culture war issue, David Henderson and Jonathan Lipow decided to use precious space on the Wall Street Journal op ed page to publish an essay titled “The Data Are In: It’s Time for Major Reopening” (ungated at the link).  They argue that “populationwide lockdowns should end” and even suggest that...

Robert Kuttner on public approval of Trump’s handing of the economy: As general support for Trump keeps sinking, there is one anomaly. According to this July 15 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, which finds Biden leading Trump by 11 points, fully 54 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. Really? That would be the corona economy, the worst since the Great Depression, thanks substantially to Trump’s catastrophic policies. How can this...

Important questions from my friend Paula W…….. ! Listen up world! Betsy DeVos, we have a few questions for you: • If a teacher tests positive for COVID-19 are they required to quarantine for 2-3 weeks? Is their sick leave covered, paid? • If that teacher has 5 classes a day with 30 students each, do all 150 of those students need to then stay home and quarantine for 14 days? • Do all 150 of those students now have to get tested? Who pays for those...

June retail sales: some actual good news; the entirety of the pandemic decline has been reversed Retail sales are the third report for June out of the four main coincident indicators that show whether the economy is in recession or expansion. And they were the third that grew again for the month. In fact, in real, inflation-adjusted terms they were higher than in February, the last month before the coronavirus pandemic hit: They were also only 0.4%...

Given the state of the race, people are starting to ask what this would mean for the future of progressive politics in America. James Kwak is gloomy: I think the policy solutions are obvious . . . The problem, of course, is the politics—not just President Trump and the Republicans, but a Democratic Party controlled by its conservative wing, defined primarily by its insistence on fiscal responsibility, and terrified of doing anything that anyone might call...

Industrial production rebounds, but will manufacturing employment continue to do so? Industrial production is the King of Coincident Indicators. The NBER almost always identifies month of the end, and frequently the beginning, of recessions based on the top and bottom of this statistic. This morning it was reported to have risen for the second month in a row in June. Let’s take a little deeper look. First, here’s the graph of both overall (blue) and...

As posted by Anne: #Coronavirus data has been removed from the U.S. CDC website after the Trump administration’s order to re-route hospital data directly to the administration. Missing are current inpatient and intensive care bed occupancy, health worker staffing, and PPE supply status. pic.twitter.com/mwBjw4QE7d — CGTN America (@cgtnamerica) July 16, 2020 Pope Francis “All dictatorships, all of them, began like this, by adulterating communication, by...