The Angry Bear

(Dan here…op-ed lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts, written before coffee on a Sunday morning and feeling older I bet.  Thinking of older, my first computer was a Commodore 128, which isn’t even a minimum RAM amount on my Kindle much less my phone.  Still, I like my two year old basic laptop and a stripped down Windows 10 for personal use.  My wife has an Apple product.  I control my e-mail by being a curmudgeon, which I find much more efficient...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for September 16 – 20 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. For all of the discussion about various iterations of the treasury bond yield curve, it is little noted that right now it is sending a different message than virtually every other long leading indicator for the economy. As usual, clicking over and reading should bring you up to the moment on the economy, and bring me a penny or...

Country Music I have been watching Ken Burns’s “Country Music”  series on PBS.  May not watch too much more of it as I am not that interested in more recent country music, although I like some of it. So the big story of this series is how much of supposedly “white music” is of African-American origin.  I had long been aware of how the banjo was of African origin, the core country instrument beside the “fiddle,” aka “violin,” which is of European...

A closer look at the housing rebound On Wednesday we got some excellent new residential construction numbers. I went into a lot more detail, showing how – exactly as I forecast – the turn in interest rates led the turn in housing sales by about six months, over at Seeking Alpha. As usual, clicking over and reading helps reward me with a penny or two for my efforts. While I am at it, on the subject of housing, here is a chart I am working on (not...

David Zetland writes in his news letter for The one-handed economist: “What if we stopped pretending the climate apocalypse can be stopped?”  lines up almost exactly with what I’ve been thinking in recent years, i.e., that we’re not making any serious dent in GHG emissions and that it’s better to focus on local community and resiliency. One ironic manifestation of this thinking is that property values in Amsterdam (a city in a region that will be...

Initial claims increasingly foreclose 2019-early 2020 downturn I’ve been monitoring initial jobless claims closely for the past several months, to see if there are any signs of stress. This is because the long leading indicators were negative one year ago, and many – but not a majority – of the short leading indicators have recently turned negative as well. So I have been on “recession watch.” But no recession is going to begin unless and until layoffs...

Eighty year old retired salesman John Garver the morning of March 28, 1979 remembers the acrid odor permeating Harrisburg as he walked out of a restaurant in Pennsylvania’s capital city. “We had this smell in the air, wondering what it was. Well it didn’t take us long to find out … that the accident started.” Fourteen miles away, the “accident” was unfolding in Unit 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, triggering panic, confusion, and within...

Housing: BOOM! Well, this is an easy post. This morning’s report (Wed.) on housing permits and starts showed new expansion highs in both overall permits and starts. The less volatile single family segment also recovered, with both single family permits and starts at one year highs, although slightly below their expansion peaks. Here are total and single family permits: And here are total and single family starts: The housing downturn is over. As...

The Strike On Saudi Oil Facilities This is going to be a tentative post because there is much that remains unclear. What I am going to do is to make it clear that stories that are being told by US authorities and largely repeated by the MSM with little critical commentary is highly questionable. As it is, it looks like the economic impact of the knocking out of about 60 percent of Saudi oil processing capacity by an attack by 20 drones will not amount to...