Economics, the Realm of Money and the Significance of GDP Growth, with an Application to Child Labor What’s economics? There are two answers. One is it’s the sphere of human activity encompassing the production and distribution of goods and services, which has sometimes been referred to as provisioning. This is quite a lot but not […]
February JOLTS: a mirror of the poor jobs report The JOLTS report on labor is noteworthy and helpful because it breaks down the jobs market into a more granular look at hiring, firing, and voluntary quits. Its drawback is that the data only goes back less than 20 years, so from the point of view […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Lower interest rates have to some extent been offset by weaker real money supply. In any event, they haven’t fed through into other, shorter term indicators just yet. As always, clicking over and […]
A President Falsely Charging ‘Treason.’ The Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” Article III; Section 3: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving […]
Trump Has Birth Nations Skipping Generations Starting around 2011 or so, Donald Trump began to get a lot of attention on the looney racist right in the US by becoming one of the leading advocates of birtherism, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii. Of course, Obamam’s father was born […]
Elizabeth Warren Wants to Collect More in Corporate Profits Taxes John Harwood reports: Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren proposes raising $1 trillion in government revenue from a new tax on profits of the largest corporations. The proposed surtax would prevent Amazon and other companies with profits exceeding $100 million from wiping out their tax liabilities altogether. […]
Real wages got gassed in March The consumer price index rose +0.4% in March, mainly as a result of a big monthly increase in gas prices. That really shouldn’t have been a surprise, since almost every time gas prices have increased by as much as they did in March — up 9% for the month […]
Downturn in manufacturing new orders adds to evidence of slowdown I don’t normally pay much attention to the new factory orders report, because it is simply too noisy to be of much use. But as of February’s report, released Monday and showing a -0.1% decline in “core” new orders, there is enough to at least […]
In a low inflation world firms tend to raise prices once a year, typically in the first quarter of the calendar year or their fiscal year. Because of this very strong seasonal pattern, on a not seasonally adjusted around 50% of the annual increase in the core CPI — excluding food and energy — occurs […]