Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 10 – 14 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The divergence between the near term vs. longer term forecast is increasing, and the risk that the forecast is too optimistic is asymmetrical, because for the economy, Trump’s chaotic tariff behavior cannot improve […]
Learning The Origin Of “Duality” Yesterday I learned that the person who first used the term “duality” in connection with linear programming, indeed with anything in economics, was John von Neumann in a private conversation with George Dantzig in 1947, the “father of linear programming.” That was the year Dantzig published his paper showing the […]
Robert J. Samuelson Goes Whole Hog Against Dems On Social Programs I want to follow Dean Baker in dumping on the Robert J. Samuelson Monday, 9/11/19 WaPo column on “The Democrats’ fairy-tale campaigns.” He may be right that lots of proposals have been put forward with no clear accounting of how much all of them […]
Kevin Drum wrote a typically brilliant post on absurdly high estimates of the growth of the number of health care administrators. I was very interested in one little passage. My comment. Dear Kevin You used to work for a tech company and IIRC in public relations. Now your day job is as a blogger-journalist. Don’t […]
People have long struggled to understand The Word of God. One might even wonder if a better approach would be to rely on artificial intelligence. However, I’m not sure AI algorithms understand Him either This shows that even God the Omnipotent can’t manage sarcasm blatant enough for Twitter. Twitter has repented, but it looks like […]
When the market is up, Trump likes to credit it to his economic policies and when the market is down he likes to find someone else to blame, like the Fed. After being in office for some two years it is time enough to either give him credit or grief and to compare him to […]
The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths. I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit. Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon on the still-unreported-in-MSM […]
We’ve lost the plot on the classic life arc of yesteryear. Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. The most recent evidence of this remarkable change comes in a new report by the real-estate firm […]
Initial jobless claims for week ending June 10 – no concern yet I have started to monitor initial jobless claims to see if there are any signs of stress. My two thresholds are: 1. If the four week average on claims is more than 10% above its expansion low. 2. If the YoY% change in […]