The Angry Bear

November housing permits boosted by multifamily dwellings November was a *relatively* good month for housing permits, as in, improved *relative* to most of this year, although not at the heights of last winter. Most importantly, the least volatile number, single family permits, was flat compared with last month, and down -2% from a year ago: There’s no change of trend here. Total permits did increase decently, and are up (less than 1%) YoY,...

11 years after the huge financial rescue operation, procrastinators look at the cost to the Treasury. The numbers are gigantic. Also the cost was negative. Saving the financial system and preventing a second great depression was, I think, the most profitable trade in human history by far. Crude accounting suggests this, but there are two relatively sophisticated arguments that the rescue didn’t yield profits and was, in fact, costly. First the notorious...

The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days.  Today, “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as “the last adult in the room” among the Trump national security team, announced his resignation effective at the end of February.  This is not a coincidence, although his letter makes it clear that he had been thinking about...

The US economy did not boom in 2018 At the beginning of each year, I try to identify economic series that I think will be most important in the next 12 months.  This year I asked: Is the US economy going to enter a Boom in 2018? There is no standard definition of a Boom. But in my lifetime there have been two occasions when the “good times” feeling was palpable, and the economy was working extremely well on a very broad basis: the 1960s and the late...

by New Deal democrat The Transportation Slowdown Well over 100 years ago, Charles Dow (he of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) posited a theory that industrial and transportation stock prices should move in tandem. Why? Because everything that factories produced had to be transported to market for delivery. So it is of interest that FedEx said yesterday that its business has been slowing down. And an important trucking transportation metric softened in...

“WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary 2018, Donald J. Trump announced on Thursday that he had been named Man of the Year by the terrorist organization known as ISIS. Trump made the announcement after receiving the news from the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Trump called ‘a terrific, fabulous guy.’ ‘I got along great with him, and he said a lot of nice things about me,” Trump said. “He said ISIS didn’t even consider anyone...

Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”.  Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and the incentives these things generate—were everything and agency, meaning culture and consciousness, were nothing.  The...

Trump is blaming the Fed for the recent poor stock market performance. For once, he may be right. The recent market plunge took the stock market PE from the top of my fair value band through the bottom. The last observation is the 14 December close. The fitted PE has is a function of both short and long term yields.  This approach implies that the market is now cheap, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a buy. Figure 1 Maybe you would prefer a...