The Angry Bear

Scenes from the jobs report 2: the unemployment rate and consumption: weak, but not recessionary  – by New Deal democrat Yesterday I looked at some employment metrics from Friday’s jobs report. Today let’s look at un- (and under-) employment. Every Thursday I repeat the mantra that jobless claims lead the unemployment rate. Here are both the U3 (blue) and U6 (red) rates from Friday’s report, compared YoY: The unemployment rate is...

Personal income, so Personal saving, ignore a huge part of Total Return — the income-from-assets measure used by every modern portfolio investor. Guess what’s missing? Personal Saving Makes More than 40% of Property Income . . . Invisible. Think Total Return, Wealth Economics, Steve Roth Matthew Klein and Joey Politano have been singularly responsible in their discussions of “excess saving” in the covid era — not least by always putting that...

Before you go on a bender claiming it is not true. It is true. Your costs of inventory and transportation are high. Three weeks on the ocean plus one week on the dock on each side of the ocean. Transportation costs and time to the buyer. Container costs this last go around were as high as $10,000. Typically they were at $4,000 or less. Are you going to have 1 – 2 weeks of safety stock or are you going to cover the ocean in-transit time. What if?...

Scenes from the leading sectors of the December jobs report: sectors of weakness and strength  – by New Deal democrat For nearly two decades, my focus on economic reporting online has been finding and examining leading indicators; those datapoints that tell us where the economy in general, and in particular jobs and income for ordinary Americans, are heading in the near future. Usually that has meant batting away DOOOOMers; those people who...

Here we are in a presidential election year, and one of the two major party candidates certain to get the nomination is still claiming the last one was stolen from him. Now, he refers to the criminals who were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison over their Jan 6 crimes as “hostages.” When did the party of “law and order” become the party that attacks the American criminal justice system?“The ongoing Republican defense of the failed coup means...

Probably getting tired of reading this. I can not think of any good reason to quell commentary on the attempt by a president, senators, and representatives to overthrow the US government. That they still walk free is repugnant. January 6, 2024, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson Today, three years to the day after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral ballots that would...

Another array of emails collecting in my In-Box offering up articles besides junk. Some interesting reads and others not so. Picked what I thought might be the best. Some are hawking subscriptions too. I like to subscribe to newsletters and magazines. The problem being never getting a chance to finish reading them all. Climate and Environment U.S. cities are getting rid of parking minimums, NPR, Laurel Wamsley. Cities are throwing out their...

Part Two of Being grateful for one big thing Baby Boomers did. Part I can be found here as written by Andy Kiersz. Gen Z, Millennials Should Stop Complaining About Baby Boomers, Economy, business insider, Andy Kiersz Excellent Charting done by the author Andy Kiersz. Detail taken from the Census Bureau, BLS, Penn World Tables, Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and World Inequality Database....

Weekly Indicators for January 1 – 5 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat I forgot to post this over the weekend, so here it is now: my Weekly Indicators post up at Seeking Alpha. I’ll put a post up later taking a detailed look at some aspects of Friday’s employment report. Tags: 2024, Weekly Indicators for January 1 - 5...

Just an old commentary from 2006 as written by Mark Thoma when he was writing Economist’s View. If you don’t know, Mark discontinued his writing there and retired. I see him now and then (or used to) on Facebook. Here he gives a bit of history on Adam Smith. “The Many Faces of Adam Smith“ This column by Alan Krueger from 2001 is a reminder that Adam Smith was not a “narrow, unyielding defender of unfettered free enterprise”: The many faces...