The Angry Bear

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for February 25 – March 1 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Last year the most significant developments were in the long leading indicators. Now that is translating into the short leading indicators. As always, clicking and reading not only should be educational for you, but rewards me a little bit for my efforts.

Visa Restrictions And Intellectual Degradation I am in New York attending the Eastern Economic Association meetings.  I was in an agent-based modeling session in which two partticipants participated by internet because they were both refused visaas to enter the US.  One was from Turkey, which I think is under strict review by the current administration.  The other, a woman from India, working for an American think tank in Toronto, may have simply been a...

Q4 GDP: mixed signals for the future (UPDATED with graphs) I didn’t post anything yesterday, so I’ll make up for it with two posts today.This morning we finally got the very delayed first look at Q4 GDP. As per my usual practice, I am less interested in what happened in the rear view mirror, which was an annualized gain of +2.6%, than what the number tells us about what lies ahead. The two forward-looking components of GDP are (1) private fixed...

Manufacturing holds on in February The theme for most reports remains that the government shutdown in December and January, plus a 30 year record cold snap for a week in January, put a real dent in the economy. That certainly was the message of December personal spending and December and January personal spending this morning. But it looks like there was no significant damage to manufacturing. This week three regional Fed banks reported February...

December housing permits and starts mixed, support slowdown scenario This morning we finally got December housing permits and starts. Remember that starts are more volatile than permits, and single family permits are the least volatile of all. Here’s what the overall data looks like: While starts and completions laid an egg, permits actually went up a little bit. In particular, for housing to be outright recessionary, I would want to see single...

The Trump Tax Cut and Big Pharma CEOs of 7 pharmaceutical multinationals addressed the Senate Finance Committee: Pharma execs offer Senate ideas to lower drug costs – except actually cutting prices. Executives from seven pharmaceutical companies — AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer and Sanofi — are testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. The pharma executives have a number of ideas to reduce drug...

Iran’s Foreign Minister Is Out This looks like bad news.  Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, hass resigned.  Apparently he has previously tried to resign several times, but President Rouhani refused to accept it.  This time Zarif did it very publicly on Instagram, ah, the uses of social media.  Anyway, apparently there is a chance he might still be talked into staying, but probably not.  It seems that he has lost the favor of Supreme Leader Khamenei,...

by Joseph Joyce Mars Descending? U.S. Security Alliances and the International Status of the Dollar A decade after the global financial crisis, the dollar continues to maintain its status as the chief international currency. Possible alternatives such as the euro or renminbi lack the broad financial markets that the U.S. possesses, and in the case of China the financial openness that allows foreign investors to enter and exit at will. Any change in the...