The Angry Bear

A new risk at the Fed: Donald Trump’s power to fire Fed Governors Calling it “breaking with decades of presidential convention,” the New York Times reported last week on Donald Trump’s open criticism of recent Federal Reserve rate hikes. quoting him as telling donors at a  fund-raiser in the Hamptons: that he had expected Mr. Powell to adhere to an easy-money monetary policy, by keeping interest rates low, when he nominated Mr. Powell in November to...

Conversable Economist Tim Taylor presents a chart representing spending over a life time on Education and Skills in America. “Figure 4 (depicted) is from a report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, titled “Addressing America’s Reskilling Challenge” (July 2018). The blue area shows public education spending, which is high during K-12 years, but the average spending per person drops off during college years. After all, many people don’t attend...

 by New Deal democrat New and existing home sales for July 2018: UPDATED with link Both new and existing home sales for July came in low. New home sales were at a 9 month low, and existing home sales at a 2 year low: That’s enough for both series to be scored as negatives, although the new home sales downturn could easily be revised away, and existing home sales are the least important of all housing indicators. I’ll have a full analysis of all home...

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...