The Angry Bear

Oddly I am back here posting. Even more oddly I am posting on the topic I am paid to address. I start by noting two things. About one year ago, many macroeconomic forecasters predicted that a recession would have started by now in the USA. I forget who placed the probability at 100%. In spite of sltightly disappointing 0.4% (1.6% if annualized) real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2024, we are not in a recesion. What went right ? The...

Listening to the back and forth between the justices and Idaho’s Solicitor General, there is tension on display here. The Idaho Solicitor General appears to take the stance the abortion is available if necessary. The justices are questioning how such could be if doctors will not treat the women if abortion is needed. That being, doctors believe they blocked by Idaho’s abortion law. Alito takes the chicken or the egg approach with US Solicitor...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Not much churn in the short leading or coincident timeframes this week. But one of the long leading indicators joined the “less bad” parade. This is what I would expect to see coming out of a recession, before growth in the shorter term improves. Just one week, but still . . . As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual...

You gotta be old enough to remember what took place in the sixties and into the seventies with regard to protesting. In 1970 when I was bathing in and drinking the Camp Lejeune water, we were selected to be trained in riot control. JIC the protestors, the student protesters were a bit rambunctious in Washington D.C. All the better we were not called out. Still the same fears we are seeing today on college campuses. Similar right-wing dialogue by...

– by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Personal income and spending has become one of the two most important monthly reports I follow. This is in large part because the big question this year is whether the contractionary effects of Fed tightening have just been delayed until this year, or whether the fact that there have been no rate hikes since last summer mean that the expansion will strengthen. Because real personal spending on services...

This is a rehash of what was going on in Flint from 2014 onward. It is mostly what I had seen, read about, and wrote about from 2014 till 2022. Republicans were in control of the state during most of this time if not all of it. Attorneys will lay claim to 1/3rd of the payout. If the state gov had been more active in resolving the issue, I am sure the attorney fees would have been less. Article by Gabrielle Gurley with a lot of input by a former...

According to The Hill the New FAFSA forms were supposed to be easier and shorter. Shorter yes, nut not so easy. There is a list of 2024-24 FAFSA issues which are confounding parents and students attempting to complete the FAFSA so as to be eligible for student aid. FAFSA forms were changed in 2023 and were supposed to be available in October 2023. Availability was delayed till December 2023. When finally released there were complications with the...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog Most of the commentary you will read about Q1 GDP that was released this morning will be about the core coincident components. For that I will simply outsource to Harvard’s Prof. Jason Furman: “much of the slowdown was in non-inertial items like inventories (-0.35pp) and net exports (-0.86pp). The better signal of final sales to private domestic purchasers was 3.1%.” I agree. With that out of...

by Lora Kelly The Atlantic A plan to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid process, better known as FAFSA has been a few years in the making. In 2020, as part of a spending bill, Congress ordered the Department of Education to create a shorter version of the FAFSA form. The new application would reduce the maximum number of questions from 108 to 36. Rose Horowitch writes, the goal was to make things easier for applicants,...

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog [Note: I’ll put up a post discussing Q1 GDP later today.] Initial and continuing claims continued their snooze-fest this week. Initial claims declined -5,000 to 207,000, continuing their nearly 3 month long range of between 200-220,000 per week. The four week average declined 1,250 to 213,250. This average has remained in the 200-225,000 range for over half a year! Finally, with the typical one...