Bibi Gets To Stay In Office (For Now) With the welcome cease fire in Israel-Palestine, it looks like Bibi Netanyahu has achieved his near term goal of remaining prime minister of Israel, thus not only remaining power but also out of jail, with barely anybody noticing that he has done this. His rival, Yair Lapid, […]
Existing vs. new home sales: sales have peaked, expect prices to soon peak I normally don’t pay much attention to existing home sales. Even though they constitute about 90% of the housing market, they have much less impact on the economy overall than new home sales (because all of the economic activity involved in building […]
First Genetically Modified Mosquito Released in the United States, Nature (News in Focus), Emily Watz, presented by Professor Joel Eissenberg commenter at Angry Bear. Biotech firm Oxitec launched a controversial field test of its insects in Florida after years of opposition from residents and regulatory complications. The issue at hand is whether it is ethical […]
Adam Smith’s been dead for more than 230 years now; Karl Marx for 138. The industrial age began around 1760; ended around 1960. Around 1950, we entered the information & technology age, an age every bit as epochal as the industrial age. Missing to date in this new age is the Adam Smith equivalent to […]
I assume/hope there’s a non-scary answer to this question, but I don’t have time to figure it out, so I’ll just throw it out here . . . From the NYT today: How can cases and deaths have declined by the same amount since January, given that older and more vulnerable people have been disproportionately […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 17 – 21 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The theme of a supply-constrained economic Boom continues, with the addition this past week of the national average of gas prices going over $3 a gallon for the first time since 2014, probably […]
Oil exports drop by the most on record to least since October 2018; global oil shortage at 1.73 million barrels per day, Focus on Fracking, RJS The “global oil shortage” is from my coverage of the May OPEC report, which i’ll paste below; I also revise global oil shortage/surplus estimates for prior months. I don’t […]
Big decline in new jobless claims continues, while decline in continuing claims has stalled New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic datapoint, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic – both new infections and deaths are near their lowest points in […]
Further considerations on the disappointing April jobs report. Consider the averages! I’ve been threatening for a couple of weeks to run some extended comments on the big miss in the April jobs report. As there’s no economic news of note today, here goes . . . . 1. It’s possible March was the outlier rather […]