The Angry Bear

Here is an especially self indulgent post. I think the useful part is this link to a Data For Progress poll showing current US public opinion is way to the left of the inside the beltway Overton Window. Most US adults support proposals which are seen as fringe left in official Washington. The presentation is verbose. A good write up by Eric Levitz is here This is interesting and raises the question of how a Congress which totally disagrees with a...

by New Deal democrat Weekly indicators for August 26 – 30 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.One of the benefits(?) of the discipline of a mechanical forecasting system is that it can be completely dissonant with what your emotions are telling you.  Right now the discipline of my long/short leading/coincident indicator system is completely at odds with the dominant DOOOM based on the yield curve inversion. Because, while the...

This is today’s topic largely because of an op-ed by Bret Stephens which is widely considered to be absolutely horrible. I haven’t read it. I want to bloviate about the issue and not just because I envy op-ed columnists. I will write after the jump, because I don’t have anything to say really. OK I have nothing to say at great length on two topics. One is what is wrong with high status main stream commentary, and one is what could be done better . My...

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The temporal aspect is particularly striking,’ writes philosopher Stephen Gardiner, who has done perhaps more than anyone to foreground it, in A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change: it catches us in a bind. Given that global warming is ‘seriously backloaded’ (every moment experiencing a higher temperature posted from the past) and ‘substantially deferred’ (the cumulative effects of current emissions...

The quick and dirty leading indicator watch has been stagnant for 18+ months [Note: I’ve been working on my “what leads consumer spending” opus, and as often happens, I don’t want to publish anything until I’m sure I’ve got something good – which means lots more research and saved graphs — and nothing whatsoever published! I owe you something for today, so here’s a little nugget ….] If you want a “quick and dirty” forecast for the economy over the next 4...

Consumer spending leads employment — but what leads consumer spending? One relationship I have consistently flogged for the past decade is that consumer spending leads employment.  That’s still true. Here is one of the graphs on that score going back over 50 years, the YoY% change, averaged quarterly, in real aggregate payrolls (blue) vs. real retail sales (red): 1965-90: 1991-2019: It is absolutely crystal clear that sales have consistently led total...

Martin Weitzman RIP Born on April Fool’s Day in 1942, Martin Weitzman died yesterday on August 27, 2019 at age 77.  Several of us here had long advocated that he share the first Nobel Prize to be given for environmental economics.  That award seems to have been given last fall, but only William Nordhaus got it for environmental while Paul Romer shared the prize for endogenous growth theory.  Mary missed out unfortunately, even though many of us think...

This Quinnipiac poll is amazing. It has the delightful feature that all major Democratic candidates are well ahead of Trump, but the really impressive fact is that Trump’s floor and Trump’s ceiling seem to be almost exactly the same — 38% to 40% on Intention to vote for him, and approval on issues other than race (32%) and the economy (46%). Amazingly there are five questions where 38% approve general approval and approval of his handling of foreign...

Short leading indicators show slowdown, not recession (for now anyway) Amount 10 days ago, I wrote that backward revisions to adjusted NIPA corporate profits meant the long leading indicators were more negative than originally believed one year ago.  Which means that watching the short leading indicators for signs of rolling over became more important. I took a comprehensive look at the short leading indicators late last week. This post is up at Seeking...