The Angry Bear

Since the early 1990s, I published this chart every month on the back cover of my publication until I retired a couple of years ago.  I thought it was a great piece of marketing to remind readers that I was a long run bull on interest rates. Readers might not pay much attention or remember claims that I was bullish, but they would pay attention to and remember this.  I even had bond managers walk out over this chart in the middle of my presentation. Now...

Notes on the June JOLTS report: weakness but no imminent downturn I’m still on vacation, so continue to expect light posting. But I thought I’d take a look at the one piece of data that came out this week, the June JOLTS report. First of all, the “hiring leads firing” mantra continues to be true: [Note: data averaged quarterly to cut down on noise.] Interesting that hiring has been essentially flat for a full year, and total separations (“firing”) for...

half showed no signs of a prior, undiagnosed illness.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), and plainly speaking, they were not mentally ill. Yesterday on Monday morning; President Trump: “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun. We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment and if necessary, involuntary confinement.” This is...

Trump should not forget that the Chinese leadership does not have to hold an election in 2020. I wonder who this gives an advantage in the trade war.

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) by Robert Waldmann The optics are as bad as they look  Dean “The Optics aren’t as bad as they look” Baquet just confirmed that he actually doesn’t do his job any more. He doesn’t decide what is on the front page of the New York Times. He doesn’t explain what he does (except force reporters to tone down their story on the Trump campaigns connections to Russia until it falsely asserted that the FBI had...

Krugman on Trump and Trade: Not Tariffic I’m no fan of the Trump tariff tantrum, but weak criticism of it does no one a service.  And while I agree with Paul Krugman on a lot of things, he has a long history of being misguided on trade policy.  Alas, his op-ed in today’s New York Times continues the legacy of the Bad Krugman, not the good one. Before getting to the theoretical meat, let’s take a moment to observe the holes in his argument that should...

Note how the survey data is weakening more than the payroll data The survey data tends to lead the payroll: In 2019 payroll employment —  what Wall Street pays attention to –is the weakest since 2012. Moreover, hours worked has flattened out: Finally, average hourly wage growth is also weak.

Scenes from the July employment report First things first: I’m on a vacation for part of this week, so don’t be surprised if there are no postings for a few days. The July employment report continued a string of good headline numbers with weak leading internals. Let’s take a look. In the good news department, the U6 underemployment rate declined to yet another new expansion low of 7.0%. This is mainly due to the continuing decline in the involuntarily...

This post will be especially confused. I am thinking about cash bail and how it is unacceptable that richer people have more liberty than poorer people. For some reason my thoughts turned to Jeffrey Epstein currently held without bail, because of course. Now he hasn’t been convicted yet, and I do support the 5th and 6th amendments, so I have a problem. I will try to solve the problem. I’m going to start with Hobbes, Locke, Mill and Nozick (which one...