The Angry Bear

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit. Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon  on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the...

We’ve lost the plot on the classic life arc of yesteryear. Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. The most recent evidence of this remarkable change comes in a new report by the real-estate firm Unison. The company, which provides financing to homebuyers by “co-investing” with them, calculated how long it would take to save...

Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet 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 claims last week were 222,000. The four week moving average was 217,750. First, the four week average is...

May real wages grow, but real aggregate payrolls on the verge of a red flag warning The consumer price index rose +0.1% in May and declined YoY to 1.8%. Again the main reason was gas prices, which declined in during the month. Below is overall CPI (blue) vs. CPI less energy (red) for the past 20 years: Now let’s turn to wages. Nominally, wages for non-supervisory employees increased +0.3% in May, so after inflation they were up +0.2%, an...

Scenes from the May employment report: expect more lackluster reports, and layoffs in manufacturing Three months ago when the poor February jobs report came out, I was just about the only commentator who saw it as a harbinger rather than an outlier. On Friday the naysayers got silenced.Let’s see how the more leading aspects of the employment report played out, with an eye towards the near future. To cut to the chase, expect more lackluster total payroll...

For party voting preference, which is more important, age or education? Looks like we have an answer For all the slicing and dicing that has been done in voting metrics for 2016 and 2018, one quandary has stood out. We know that higher educational attainment has strongly correlated with voting for Democrats, and we also know that there was a stark age difference in votes between Clinton and Trump in 2016: a majority of voters younger than 45 voted for...

Juan Cole at Informed Comment has a post up by Will de Freitas Should we cover the Sahara Desert with Solar Panels to Fight Climate Disaster? A map of North Africa is shown, with a surprisingly small box somewhere in Libya or Algeria shaded in. An area of the Sahara this size, the caption will say, could power the entire world through solar energy. Over the years various different schemes have been proposed for making this idea a reality. Though a...