September existing home sales: yet another poor housing report While existing home sales are roughly 90% of the entire housing market, they are much less important as an economic indicator because they do not have the knock-on effects of construction improvements, and less of the landscaping and indoor improvements, that new homes do. But they […]
Kevin Hassett and Irwin Steltzer Join in on the Fiscal Dishonesty Brad DeLong is annoyed at the latest from Irwin Stelzer: Hassett and others in the administration point out that despite a hefty reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, government revenues rose by $3.3 trillion in the fiscal year just ended. […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for October 15 – 19 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Between them, high interest rates and tariffs are affecting the readings in all three timeframes. As usual, clicking on the link and reading the post puts a little coin in my pocket, as […]
September JOLTS report: a jobs market moving from thriving to hot Tuesday’s JOLTS report once again confirmed the very good employment report from one month ago, with two series making all-time highs and one an expansion high: Quits ust below their all-time high set one month ago Hires made a new all-time high Total separations […]
Jargon is a heck of a drug: If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. The discourse of global warming/climate change is lousy with jargon. This rampant obfuscation gives science […]
Or not enough. Nate Silver has long performed fairly complicated calculations with (lots of) raw data. Even back when he was Poblano at DailyKos this was highly controversial. Now that he leads a huge team at fivethirtyeight.com, it is almost necessary just to decide whether to trust them, because it is very time consuming to […]
Tracking Trump’s tariffs: US vs. Canadian rail loads Let me start out by saying that there is an excellent case for the US imposing a VAT (“value added tax”) similar to those enacted by Canada and European countries in order to recapture the losses due to far lower wages in China and other developing countries. […]
MBS Must Go The grisly details of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi now coming out make it clear that the one thing that would really clear the air would be for 33-year old Muhammed bin Salman bin Abdulaiz al Sa’ud (MBS) to be replaced as Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and to be removed […]
by New Deal democrat Extended comments on industrial production, housing permits and starts at Seeking Alpha My take on the Industrial Production report yesterday, and my extended take on the housing permits and starts report this morning, are both up at Seeking Alpha. You can click on the respective links to access them. In each case, the YoY comparisons […]
Fiscal Dishonesty from Paul Ryan (Surprise!) We earlier noted that when our Treasury Secretary wrote this: Government receipts totaled $3,329 billion in FY 2018. This was $14 billion higher than in FY 2017, an increase of 0.4 percent…Outlays were $4,108 billion, $127 billion above those in FY 2017, a 3.2 percent increase. He was basically lying to […]