The Angry Bear

A bold forecast: there will be no autumn surge in housing this year The big issue this year in housing is whether increased mortgage rates and higher prices have merely resulted in a deceleration in the increase in new housing sales and construction, or whether housing is actually rolling over. As I’ve written several times in the last month, there is accumulating evidence that it is actually the latter: housing has at very least plateaued. The acid...

Via ElNuevoDia at LG&M, “Gamblers are now betting that Kavanaugh will not be confirmed.” The market in question, at PredictIt, seems rather straightforward. Note, though, that the contract only opened five days ago (18 September) and traded consistently in the 60-70% range through yesterday (22 Sep), closing at 61% and only reaching as low as 55%. In the past two hours, more than 20,000 transactions has occurred, which is greater than the volume on...

As the number of workmen that can be kept in employment by any particular person must bear a certain proportion to his capital, so the number of those that can be continually employed by all the members of a great society must bear a certain proportion to the whole capital of that society, and never can exceed that proportion. — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations An”invisible hand” reaches up out of the subterranean depths of that “whole capital”...

Senator Grassley tweeting: “Five times now we hv granted extension for Dr Ford to decide if she wants to proceed w her desire stated one wk ago that she wants to tell senate her story Dr Ford if u changed ur mind say so so we can move on I want to hear ur testimony. Come to us or we to u,” I like how tweeting brings out the intellect in people and especially our politicians. And Chuckie the tweeting senator does this on a public forum with Ford and...

“What Keynes Ignored” Ruth Sutherland wrote in The Daily Mail a couple of days ago: Here is how Keynes “ignored” those “workaholic tendencies”: Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has...

A hypothesis for Prof. Krugman: the transmission method was FEAR In his recent column disagreeing with Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman asks for an explanation as to how a financial panic could lead to years thereafter of a slow recovery. Specifically, Krugman says that he “really really wants to hear about the transmission mechanism.” After all, the financial panic eased in 2009. And yet, outside of the very noteworthy exceptions of corporate profits...

Housing: a big miss in permits with important ramifications NOTE: I’ll have a more comprehensive report up at Seeking Alpha later, and will link to it once it is posted. Despite a smart month over month increase in starts, this morning’s report on housing permits and starts, taken as a whole, was a sharp negative. It’s true that starts, both in total and for single family units only, were higher than their readings from the last two months. This is...

A detailed look at Industrial Production during this expansion In the past week there’s been a little highbrow relitigation of the drivers of the “Great Recession” between Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke. Bernanke plumps for it having been a “credit event” — and as to the crisis of 2008, he is clearly correct — while Krugman says it was primarily a “housing event,” although Krugman also acknowledges that he is mainly speaking of the aftermath from 2009...