The Angry Bear

Recently, I claimed that fivethirtyeight.com is too cautious when correcting polls for house effects. Multiplying their correction by 4/3 gives lower volatility of generic congressional ballot polls (and for the past 100 days multiplying by 3/2 works even better). I think the are conservative, because adjusting or correcting polls is bound to be controversal and so they impose a pseudo prior that all pollsters are unbiased. In any case, I would like to...

Ian Millhouser correctly denounces not only Trump’s assault on the 14th amendment but also reporters who print absolutely false assertions. The issue is Trump’s clearly false claim that he can eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order. In fact “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States … ” – US Constitution Amendment 14. Millhouser’s post is too good to...

by Joseph Joyce The 2018 Globie: “Crashed” Each year I choose a book to be the Globalization Book of the Year, i.e., the “Globie”. The prize is strictly honorific and does not come with a check. But I do like to single out books that are particularly insightful about some aspect of globalization.  Previous winners are listed at the bottom. This year’s choice is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze of Yale...

by New Deal democrat Housing has peaked* *(unless the Fed lowers interest rates)My comprehensive look at September housing data is up at Seeking Alpha. The downtrend in housing statistics has been sustained and severe enough for me to make the call that housing has peaked, by most measures, between last November and this past March. This does not mean that I am calling for a recession at this time. But it does mean that this long leading indicator is...

I made a mistake. And it’s a good thing. Following up on my Running on Empty post, I wanted to give a more finely-grained analysis of climate costs relative to GDP growth, so I returned to my sources to see who their sources were and how they did their calculations. Watson et al., compiled their estimate from National Centers for Environmental Information, “U.S. Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters” and Paulina Jaramillo and Nicholas Muller, “Air...

The Housing Affordability Crisis This morning both the Case-Shiller House Price Indexes for September, and Third Quarter Median Asking Rent were reported, as was the rental vacancy rate.  Together they reveal that all types of shelter costs, whether housing or apartments, are at or near record levels. The Case Shiller 20 City index was reported up 5.5% YoY, and the National Index was up 5.8% YoY. Meanwhile median household income, as reported by Sentier...

A little over a year ago, Robert Watson, former chair of the IPCC, and two co-authors published a report titled “The Economic Case for Climate Action in the United States.” Based on trends over the past few decades, the authors estimated the current total annual cost in the U.S. of losses from weather events intensified by climate change and health damage from fossil fuel pollution to be $240 billion, which they described as “about 40 percent of current...

Setting a baseline for a manufacturing slowdown If I am right that by roughly midyear 2019 the economy will experience a substantial slowdown, then we ought to start seeing a deceleration in the leading indicators for manufacturing soon. Additionally, if rail transportation is accurately signaling that a slowdown is already hitting due to the impact of Trump’s tariffs and China’s retaliation, producers ought to be noticing the effects almost immediately,...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for October 22 – 26 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Weakness, which had been confined to the long leading indicators, is now showing up in some of the short leading indicators as well. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs look like they are taking an immediate bite out of economic activity. In other words, all of that front-running that boosted inventory accumulation that showed up in Q3 GDP...