The Angry Bear

Pence’s Potemkin Village on the Mexican Border Merriam Webster defines a Potemkin Village as: an impressive facade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition Mike Pence visited a Potemkin Village in Donna, Texas: Pence also visited a tent-like temporary detention facility in Donna, Texas, that holds unaccompanied children and immigrant families. The new and mostly clean facility stood in stark contrast to the McAllen station Pence later...

Friday evening the S&P 500 closed at 3013.77, up 20.2 % year to date. But much of that gain is just recovering from the drop in late 2019, as  it is only up some 3.4% from September, 2019. This is the first time the S&P closed above 3000 and people are wondering if the market is overvalued. The S&P 500 PE is now at 19.6, almost exactly where my model implies it should be.  As the chart shows it is right in the middle of my estimated fair value...

Via Evonomics, Steve Keen critiques Norhaus’s model for predicting economic damage per degree of average temperature rise….nerdy, and includes graphs and math, but worth a look. By Steve Keen This piece is part of a series from Steve Keen, Climate Change and the Nobel Prize in Economics: The Age of Rebellion. In the previous post, Keen noted the contrast between the urgency that Extinction Rebellion sees about limiting global warming to no more than 1.5...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for July 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.Now that the Fed has all but assured a dovish stance going forward, the longer term forecast has become even more positive.

Does Turkish Lira Decline Mean Turkey Leaves NATO? Probably not, but Turkey is about to receive Russian S-400 missiles against US demands.  More signifigantly the US will kill high level US F-35 agreements, and will not fly US planes over Turkey if it uses the Russian systems.  This threatens Turkish membership in NATO. The immediate result of this in financial markets has been a substantial decline of the Turkish lira over the last several weeks.  While...

Initial claims positive to start July, but trend in continuing claims the weakest in 9 years I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress.My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in the monthly average turns higher. Here’s this week’s update. Initial jobless claims last week were 209,000. This is in the lower part of its range...

Real average and aggregate wages improved in June Now that we have the June inflation reading, let’s finish out our week focusing on the labor market. First of all, nominal average hourly wages in June increased +0.2%, while consumer prices increased +0.1%, meaning real average hourly wages for non-managerial personnel increased +0.1%. Together with upward revisions to prior months, this brings real wages up to 97.2% of their all time high in January...

The Condition Of North Korean Conventional Weapons This is based on essentially gossip, or if you prefer, a rumor.  I have been dining in Washington again and someone there who is in fact both well known and very well informed, but whom I shall not name, made a comment about the state of conventional weapons in DPRK and also said that this has not been publicly known.  According to this person their condition is much worse than publicly believed.  So out...

The Rise of Global Innovation by US Multinationals Lee G. Branstetter, Britta Glennon, and J. Bradford Jensen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics provide an interesting discussion of the risks and opportunities from the following: Total US R&D spending as a share of GDP increased slightly from 2.5 percent in 1999 to 2.7 percent in 2016.2 Multinationals are an important driver of aggregate R&D spending in the United States.3...