The Angry Bear

Hannity as Goebbels Joseph Goebbels famously said that if you want to convince a populace of A Big Lie (fake news), then you do it by repeating it, over and over and over again.  For a long  time I havebou been keeping an eye on Hannity, reportedly nightly conversing with Trump after his show.  What struck me some time ago how repetitive the core pats of his introductory monologue are.  I have increasingly noticed that pro-Trump people seem to believe...

Is the rental vacancy rate a leading signal for the housing market? Here is something I noticed while putting together my piece yesterday on the housing market. Three of the series — new home sales, existing home sales, and single family starts — all peaked last November: That made me go back and think about an anomaly I had noticed, but hadn’t figured out, with regard to the rental vacancy rate: which, according to the graph, peaked in the...

[embedded content] Listen to the first 5 minutes and you get a clue as to what Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings may be like as told by Robin Williams. Maybe I Te Fisher King there is a hint of his being ill.

Pew Charitable Trust confirms the “rental (and ownership) affordability crisis” In case you thought I was talking through my hat about the general lack of affordability of all types of housing, including both owning and renting, the Pew Charitable Trust has also stepped up with a nearly identical analysis.  Go read the whole thing, but here are a few especially noteworthy excerpts: [A]ccording to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies[, d]emand...

Saudi ARAMCO IPO Definitely Cancelled Reuters reports that the proposed IPO by Saudi ARAMCO, which would have been the world’s largest, has definitely been canceled.  I have posted previously posted about delays in the IPO and rumors it would be cancelled.  Now it has been. The reports say that there were multiple factors.  There were problems with finding a venue for the IPO, with the last candidate being the exchange in Riyadh.  There were reports...

“Economists are active militants against the concept of the lump of labor, that is, the popular idea that the total number of jobs or of working hours is fixed (Walker, 2007).” The quote is the first line from a 2017 paper by Tito Boeri, et al. It gives me confidence that at least some of the time my message is getting through. The image below is from a 2018 report published by the Roosevelt Institute. It tells me there is still a huge amount of work to...

Can the Fed successfully steer between Scylla and Charybdis? An update As I type this, the spread between 2 year and 10 year Treasuries is back to 0.25%, the level below which I switch my rating on the yield curve from positive to neutral. Already the spread is tight enough that, even if it never inverts, it suggests a slowdown in the next 6-12 months, as happened in 1984 and 1995 in the graph below of real YoY GDP growth and the Fed funds rate:...

(Dan here…a little late posting,,,my fault) A graph for Sunday: 2012 Obama voters by 2016 vote  – by New Deal democrat This is a graph I’ve been meaning to comment on, that I saw on Vox.com a couple of weeks ago. It breaks down Obama voters from 2012 based on who they voted for in 2016, and adds in Romney voters who voted for Clinton in 2016: As an aside, note that the graphs measure opinions per group, and definitely *not* their number. Also,...

Weekly Indicators for August 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There were 4 long leading indicators that were on the cusp of changing. To see what happened, please  put a penny or two in my pocket by heading on over and reading!