The Angry Bear

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...

More Likely Bad Economic Forecasting: This Time From OECD And CBO That would be the quintessential establishment and boringly conventional Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based “rich nations'” entity that grew out of the Marshall Plan and has a reputation for excellent data, and also the Congressional Budget Office, generally regarded as bipartisan and highly professional. So I saw their forecasts of US economic...

A Framework for Coronavirus Policy There are two general ways to reduce the transmission of the virus.  One is “engineering”, changing the physical environment, the other is “social”, changing behavior to keep people distant from each other.  Under engineering, we can include not only physical partitions, UV lighting and ventilation, but also mask-wearing and other PPE.  I know, there is a very large behavioral component to masking, but I want to focus...

Blacks Should Be More Afraid Of Other Blacks Than Cops Rudy Giuliani joined Fox and Friends to trash Mayor de Blasio and decree that Black men should be more afraid of other Black men than of his cop buddies murdering black men with racist intent. Echoing Trump’s “law and order” idiocy and hatred of the Black Lives Movement, Giuliani gave his unfettered support to law enforcement, and decreed that he has always been the true savior of New York. Me: What...

Never thought of myself as a global traveler. My kids kind of mentioned it as I was always bringing something home for them and my wife. I did ship home a Tang Dynasty tomb horse and drummer from Hollywood Road in Hong Kong.  Can not say I am an Indiana Jones type taking artifacts which belong in museums. After working a 10-12 hour shift with the Thai, we would go to dinner, eat Thai and relax. This was one of the places we would go to, which was a short...

Coronavirus dashboard for July 14: A few US States are containing the coronavirus Headlines for the US: Total infections: 3,364,704 7 day average: 60,997 Total deaths: 135,615 7 day average: 780 We all know that taken as a whole, the US is failing abysmally in controlling the coronavirus. At least 13 States most notably including California are “re-closing” at least in part.  In the last week, deaths, which had continued to decline despite the renewed...

Epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding . . . “No other ways to spin this.” Common Dreams, “Warnings of Possible Cover-Up in Progress” I was hoping I could get the clip of Doctor Wen discussing what the Trump administration has done in its end run around the CDC. I couldn’t C&P the embed code as it is in a lock down and I do not have the wave length to create one for it. You can view the news clip here “Trump Orders Hospitals to give him the data.”...

The 2020 Presidential election nowcasts and forecast: growing evidence for a likely Biden blowout For the past three weeks I have posted a projection of the Electoral College vote based solely on State rather than national polls (since after all that is how the College operates) that have been reported in the last 30 days. Here’s how it works: – States where the race is closer than 3% are shown as toss-ups. – States where the range is between 3% to 5%...