The Angry Bear

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...

Industrial production rebounds; another message of slowdown, no recession  Industrial Production is the King of Coincident Indicators.  When industrial production peaks and troughs coincides more often than any other indicator to NBER’s recession dating. Let’s take a look at the report for August, which was pretty darn good, which was released this morning. Production as a whole increased 0.6%, and last month’s report was revised upward by +0.1%. The...

About the time I finished up my post on Biden, I get this article from Dan discussing how Biden is kissing the butts of drug companies to more-than-likely get campaign donations. Everyone else has been concentrating on individual (you know people of lesser means) donations and many candidates have refused to take corporate donations. Biden is not ashamed to take money from corporations. Gee, whata surprise! Candidate Joe Biden: “By the way, great drug...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for September 9 – 13 at Seeking Alpha I realized that I neglected to post a link to this Saturday’s Weekly Indicators post, which was up at Seeking Alpha.  So here it is. The theme over the past few months has been that, despite worsening conditions in manufacturing, and almost singular forecaster attention to the yield curve, many of the short and long term indicators have been improving, or are starting to...