Open thread Dec. 23, 2022, Angry Bear, angry bear blog

Weekly Indicators for December 19 – 23 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Coincident indicators continue to ever so microscopically worsen – but not yet in recession territory; while there is an increasing suggestion from the long leading indicators that a recession could be relatively short. Provided, of course, that […]

New home sales for November: at last, a bright spot! (relatively speaking) New home sales are very volatile, and heavily revised. But they frequently are the first housing metrics to turn. And November’s new home sales report suggests that they may indeed have made their low. Last month new home sales increased to 640,000 annualized, […]

From the New York Times comes this list of trends in real estate, houses, mortgages, and the impact on buyers and sellers. The State of Real Estate Whether you’re renting, buying or selling, here’s a look at real estate trends. Rising mortgage rates. Faltering home sales. Skyrocketing rents. We spoke with economists, mortgage brokers and […]

Goodbye 117th Congress  Merry Christmas, you all. So, the 117th Congress is done, and Nancy Pelosi is ending her historic run as Speaker of the House.  It passed more legislation than we have seen happen in a congress in a very long time.  While Joe Biden did not get all he wanted, much less the […]

Just finished “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the making of a postwar stalemate” by Mary Sarotte. The book was recommended to me by Bruce Cochrane. It is an excellent insight into current events in Ukraine today. The title comes from the assurance given by then-Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev that German […]

Tyler Cowen points us to YouChat, a new AI chatbot, that as far as I can see after studying this carefully for 15 seconds is supposed to be more up to date than the OpenAI bot and integrated with a search engine which naturally makes it the next new thing and presumably worth billions of […]

Real personal income and spending hold up (thank you, lower gas prices!) but still consistent with onset of recession This morning’s report on personal income and spending for November shows why I pay more attention to real retail sales as a forecasting tool. First, to the data: personal income increased nominally by 0.3% in November, […]

Durable goods orders appear to have peaked  [Note: I’ll post about personal income and spending, as well as new home sales, later.] I normally don’t pay much attention to the monthly durable goods report, but this morning’s report for November appears significant. That’s because durable goods spending has been one of the few short leading […]