The Angry Bear

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Our final housing statistics of the month are the FHFA and Case Shiller repeat sales indexes. As usual, keep in mind that mortgage rates lead home sales, which in turn lead prices. Which, in turn, lead the official CPI measure of shelter by a year or more. This morning the FHFA purchase only price index through February spiked a sharp 1.2% (!) on a seasonally adjusted monthly basis, causing the YoY...

By Les Leopold Chelsea Green Publishing Interesting book I just started to touch upon. Book review by Paul Prescod. Last section touches upon why layoffs may happen . . . Stock Buybacks and Deregulation. Across the political spectrum, it seems as if the right to decent employment has disappeared from the agenda. Wars, natural disasters, and Donald Trump’s antics grab headlines while the closing of a major factory doesn’t register a blip....

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog About 10 years ago, I went looking for what I called “mid cycle indicators.” In other words, I wanted to go beyond leading or lagging indicators to find at least a few that tend to peak somewhere near the middle of an expansion. That synapse was jangled when I read the title of a recent update by financial analyst Cam Hui, “Relax, it’s just a mid-cycle expansion.”  Since I hadn’t looked at the...

This is the easiest one. No possibility of changes. It’s Biden/Harris v. Trump/Sycophant. For Biden, the alternative is clear: the race would be between Kamala Harris and DJT. Credit where due: Biden has reconfirmed on multiple occasions that he does not intend to replace Harris with Sherrod Brown the Mythical Generic Democrat with No Baggage, or even the fifth columnist whose every peccadillo is known to the opposing party (G.N.) As of this...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog On Friday the CDC updated its COVID death statistics through March 31, which means that we now have 4 full years of data. It also updated its hospitalization data through April 20, and to cut to the chase, last week saw a record low hospitalizations for COVID – 5,615 – since its onset. So this is a good time to look at the state of the now-endemic pandemic. When it comes to both hospitalization and...

Matteo Wong The Atlantic Abbreviated take at Angry Bear on what is happening at Tesla. Presently, the media has not been to kind to Tesla and its founder Elon Musk. The latest in The Atlantic gives a run down on the past and where Musk may take Tesla in the future. It sounds and looks better than what Tesla has been experiencing. Of late, Tesla’s cars have come to seem a bit hazardous. The self-driving features have been linked to...

SWI swissinfo.ch An interesting story coming out of Switzerland about Nestlé. In 2017 Nestlé adds sugar to baby food in low-income countries, report finds . . . made the following plan: Between 2017 and 2020 we want to reduce the added sugar in our products by a further 5%. In 2017 alone, Nestlé Switzerland withdrew 111 tonnes of sugar from its products, which is the equivalent of 22 million teaspoons or 444 million kcal. Much work had already...

At Thursday’s Supreme Court hearing on Trump’s immunity claim, Justice Alito worried that prosecuting former presidents would create an incentive for incumbent presidents to subvert democracy to remain in office and avoid prosecution (Transcript, p. 110-11): JUSTICE ALITO: All right.  Let me end –end with just a question about what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society, which is something that we all want.  I’m sure you...

by Matthew Cunnigham – Cook The problems with Medicare Advantage is coding and pricing for care. And Fee for Service participants pay for the MA costs even though they do not use MA. “When accounting for favorable selection of enrollees in MA and higher MA coding intensity, we estimate Medicare spends approximately 22 percent more for MA enrollees. This spend is more than if those beneficiaries were a part of FFS Medicare. The difference...

by Lloyd Alter Carbon Upfront! The Toronto Star leads today with a story, “Ripe for a challenge,” in which climate change reporter Kate Allen describes attempts to grow strawberries indoors in Canada “as red-ripe and juicy as if they came out of a sunny field in July.” Canadians import C$6.2 billion more fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables than our food exports, “but a pandemic, wars, and the steadily thumping drumbeat of climate change have...