The Angry Bear

Taxes Up 30%! A couple of months ago yours truly complained a bit about some fiscal dishonesty coming from Team Trump: He was basically lying to us hoping the public would be too stupid to realize that when the price level rose by 2.5% during the same period, we are talking about a 2% real decrease in tax revenues. But if we look at customs duties we do see an increase in a category that represents a very modest part of Federal tax collections. Back in...

Could an Oil Patch decline turn a 2019 slowdown into an outright recession? One of the items I mentioned in my piece yesterday at Seeking Alpha was the recent big decline in oil prices. Please go read the piece, it puts a couple of pennies in my pocket! But in that article I referenced the decline in industrial production that was caused by the 2014-15 decline in gas prices. I wanted to follow up a little here. In 2014 into early 2015, Oil prices...

Back down from the mountains where it was snowing yesterday, a silent beauty. Sitting in my daughter’s kitchen drinking a cup of Keurig manufactured coffee. The household is quiet as I think about the events of the last months and attempt to pen a few words. Washington is still shut down and one man pouts. Thousands of people suffer the impact of a hurricane in Puerto Rico, floods in the South, and wild fires in California due to our impact upon the...

On the Front Lines of Climate Change: Old White Homeowners, Many of them Upper Class The other night I was sitting at home, locked in a conversation about climate change and race.  How is this a racial issue, I asked?  I realize that the society I live in has pervasive racism, and one should always keep this in mind, but how specifically is climate change worse for nonwhites? Well, it’s all about first and worst impacts, I was told.  People of color are...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis wrote an excellent retrospective on the career of Paul Ryan‘He was the future of the party’: Ryan’s farewell triggers debate about his legacy They are quite harsh, but not, I think, quite harsh enough. My comment: This is an excellent article. Tough but fair with no sugar coating but also no discourtesy. However,...

by New Deal democrat The Fed scrapes Scylla after careening into Charybdis In the past several years, I have described the Fed as trying to steer in between the Scylla of a yield curve inversion and the Charybdis of higher rates wounding the housing market.Recently several trends have reversed. This offers some relief to housing, but more risks to the economy as a whole. This post is Up at Seeking Alpha. By the way, several times yesterday and today, the...

November housing permits boosted by multifamily dwellings November was a *relatively* good month for housing permits, as in, improved *relative* to most of this year, although not at the heights of last winter. Most importantly, the least volatile number, single family permits, was flat compared with last month, and down -2% from a year ago: There’s no change of trend here. Total permits did increase decently, and are up (less than 1%) YoY,...

11 years after the huge financial rescue operation, procrastinators look at the cost to the Treasury. The numbers are gigantic. Also the cost was negative. Saving the financial system and preventing a second great depression was, I think, the most profitable trade in human history by far. Crude accounting suggests this, but there are two relatively sophisticated arguments that the rescue didn’t yield profits and was, in fact, costly. First the notorious...

The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days.  Today, “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as “the last adult in the room” among the Trump national security team, announced his resignation effective at the end of February.  This is not a coincidence, although his letter makes it clear that he had been thinking about...