The Angry Bear

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving with family, friends, or strangers. My young and pretty 20 – something year-old wife and I were traveling years ago. We were standing in a long line into the only restaurant at O’hare airport. It was a couple of days before a holiday and the airport was packed. If you frequent O’Hare today, you must be thinking; “What is he thinking? O’Hare has many assorted places to dine.” Like I said this was years ago. O’Hare...

Housing rebound continues; price appreciation stabilizes Just a quick note, as I am traveling today.New home sales declined slightly in October from September, but remain at the high end of this expansion. The renewed uptrend in housing sales, due to lower mortgage rates, is clearly intact: Meanwhile house prices, as measured by the Case Shiller index, also increased at a slightly faster YoY rate, 3.2% for September vs. 3.1% in August (blue): As I...

Putin Beating Up People At Russia’s Top University That would be Moscow State University, the “Harvard” of Russia. Not in the MSM at all, but I have mu sources, and apparently sometime last week the FSB, the successor to the domestic  arm of the old  KGB, raised Moscow State (whose main building is one of those “Stalin Gothic” skyscrapers) to capture a student who had been posting leaflets on walls protesting recent government actions.  He was reortedly...

Rebound in existing home sales continues, but beware the housing “choke collar” Although they account for about 90% of the entire housing market, existing home sales are the least consequential to the economy. That’s because building new homes entails a bunch of economic activity, from architects, builders, building trades contractors, landscapers in the building process, followed by furniture, appliances, and yard improvements after the owners move in....

Have the Transfer Pricing Experts at KPMG Heard of the Repo Ruckus? If one thinks Trump’s economic advisors are the dumbest people on the planet, I have a new candidate for that award – a few supposed experts on intercompany loans that work for KPMG: In 2017, the ARRC selected the Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) as the alternative that represents the best replacement rate for USD-denominated LIBOR. SOFR is based on overnight transactions in the...

by David Zetland  (originally published at One handed economist) Real decentralization is radical Visionaries, consultants and public speakers love to explain how they are embracing distribution over decentralization over centralization, using an image like this: Figure 1 What drives me crazy about this image is that it actually undersells true decentralization, i.e., when everyone is connected to everyone: Really decentralized (D) We already have...

The problem of plastic waste seems insurmountable. The good news is plastic recycling is on the rise and that is good for the circular economy. In parts 1, 2 and 3, we delved into the role of the waste management and recycling industry and how material sorting technologies can help. Part 4 is all about the increased use of recyclates as an essential part of properly closing the plastic cycle. [embedded content] The plastics industry is facing a great many...

Being that I have lots to say and have not had time to formulate it into posts I figured I would just start here.  2006.  Do watch it.  He tried to warn us.   But hey…Now the news media is being threatened too and they are concerned. [embedded content] I keep coming to these words: But don’t ask me what I think of you I might not give the answer that you want me to” Ooh, well One question for MSNBC who now puts on David Jolly regularly as the...

by Eric Kramer Russ Roberts and The Rat Hole Fallacy Liberals believe that unregulated markets do not adequately supply public goods like roads, parks, and scientific research, and that government should use its taxing and spending powers to provide these goods.  Conservatives agree that markets fail to provide ideal quantities of public goods, but they emphasize that government spending is often wasteful and inefficient, and they argue that waste and...