The Angry Bear

Kevin Drum wrote a typically brilliant post on absurdly high estimates of the growth of the number of health care administrators. I was very interested in one little passage. My comment. Dear Kevin You used to work for a tech company and IIRC in public relations. Now your day job is as a blogger-journalist. Don’t quit your day job. you wrote “Once you take into account the growth in health care generally, the share devoted to administration has gone up...

People have long struggled to understand The Word of God. One might even wonder if a better approach would be to rely on artificial intelligence. However, I’m not sure AI algorithms understand Him either This shows that even God the Omnipotent can’t manage sarcasm blatant enough for Twitter. Twitter has repented, but it looks like a very long penance to me. I fear not His wrath, for though I walk in the valley of copyright infringment fair use is...

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit. Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon  on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the...

We’ve lost the plot on the classic life arc of yesteryear. Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. The most recent evidence of this remarkable change comes in a new report by the real-estate firm Unison. The company, which provides financing to homebuyers by “co-investing” with them, calculated how long it would take to save...

Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher. Here’s this week’s update. Initial claims last week were 222,000. The four week moving average was 217,750. First, the four week average is...

May real wages grow, but real aggregate payrolls on the verge of a red flag warning The consumer price index rose +0.1% in May and declined YoY to 1.8%. Again the main reason was gas prices, which declined in during the month. Below is overall CPI (blue) vs. CPI less energy (red) for the past 20 years: Now let’s turn to wages. Nominally, wages for non-supervisory employees increased +0.3% in May, so after inflation they were up +0.2%, an...

Scenes from the May employment report: expect more lackluster reports, and layoffs in manufacturing Three months ago when the poor February jobs report came out, I was just about the only commentator who saw it as a harbinger rather than an outlier. On Friday the naysayers got silenced.Let’s see how the more leading aspects of the employment report played out, with an eye towards the near future. To cut to the chase, expect more lackluster total payroll...