New Deal democrats Weekly Indicators for July 24 – 28
Weekly Indicators for July 24 – 28 at Seeking Alpha
– by New Deal democrat
My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha.
While there continues to be evidence of the normal progression of weakness from long leading to short leading to coincident indicators, there has also been an anomalous major positive resurgence in some of the short leading indicators.
By normal historical standards, we “ought” to be well into a downturn. And yet consumer spending continues strongly, as we saw yesterday in the personal income and spending report, and as was reflected in Thursday’s Q2 GDP.
As the mid year data rolls in, I will be shortly updating all of my systems, starting with a comprehensive look at the long leading indicators (probably!) this week.
In the meantime, the high frequency report will bring you up to the virtual moment on the data, and bring me a small reward for the effort I put into it.
New Deal democrats Weekly Indicators for July 17 – 21, Angry Bear, New Deal democrat
In Maine, Biden jokes that Republicans may impeach him because inflation is starting to cool down
AP – July 28
President Joe Biden — buoyed by new signs the economy is continuing on the upswing — took a swipe on Friday at House Republicans’ flirtations with an impeachment inquiry, quipping that GOP lawmakers may decide to impeach him because inflation is cooling down.
Standing in a textile manufacturing facility in Auburn Biden pointed to inflation statistics that showed the U.S. has the lowest rate of price increases among the world’s biggest economies. Though he was careful to say he was not taking a victory lap on the economy, Biden suggested that his Republican opponents in Congress may need to find a fresh line of attack against him because of improving economic circumstances.
Earlier this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made his most direct remarks yet that GOP lawmakers could launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden over unproven claims of financial misconduct related to Hunter Biden, the president’s son. However, the California Republican has acknowledged privately that it’s too soon to know whether the president was aware of — much less involved in — his son’s financial dealings in a way that would rise to the level of impeachable conduct.
While McCarthy publicly floated the inquiry this week, the White House has engaged little with those efforts, instead focused on promoting “Bidenomics” and the president’s domestic agenda. Aides have repeatedly played down any inquiry as a hypothetical and pointed out the hesitation among McCarthy’s own ranks about pursuing impeachment against the president. …
Indeed, that was the focus of the White House on Friday, as Biden used the trip to Maine to sign an executive order that would encourage companies to manufacture new inventions in the United States. It was Biden’s first trip to the state as president.
“I’m not here to declare victory on the economy. We have more work to do,” Biden said. But “we have a plan for turning things around. ‘Bidenomics’ is just another way of saying restoring the American dream.”
The Democrat won three out of the state’s four electoral votes in 2020 and is seeking to shore up his support in the state. Maine allocates its electoral votes by congressional district, and Biden lost the vote in the state’s 2nd District, which provided the only electoral vote in New England for then-President Donald Trump, a Republican.
By going to that district on Friday, Biden sought to show its blue-collar voters that he’s committed to them, as a single electoral vote could be critical in a narrow 2024 presidential election. …
Vaguely related.
Trump Threatens Republicans Who Don’t Help Him Exact Vengeance
NY Times – July 29
Former President Donald J. Trump lashed out at Republicans in Congress while campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, threatening members of his party who do not share his appetite for pursuing corruption investigations against President Biden and his family — and for retribution.
In a litany of grievances about his deepening legal woes and the direction of the country, the twice-indicted former president cast G.O.P. holdouts as meek during a rally in Erie, Pa., criticizing their response to what he described as politically motivated prosecutions against him.
“The Republicans are very high class,” he said. “You’ve got to get a little bit lower class.”
And then Mr. Trump, the overwhelming front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, put party members on notice.
“Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democratic fraud should be immediately primaried,” said Mr. Trump, to the roaring approval of several thousand supporters at the Erie Insurance Arena. …
since NDD doesn’t have a Covid post up this week, i’ll just deposit what i wrote about it here..
A Positive Covid Milestone
NY Times – David Leonhardt – July 17
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal. …
After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. …
The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. …
Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. …
Goldilocks and the Bidenomics Bears
NY Times – Paul Krugman – July 31
It’s hard to overstate how good the U.S. economic news has been lately. It was so good that it didn’t just raise hopes for the future; it led to widespread rethinking of the past. Basically, Bidenomics, widely reviled and ridiculed a year ago, looks a lot better in retrospect. It’s starting to look as if the administration got it mostly right, after all.
About the economic news: First up was the employment report for June, which didn’t just show continuing solid job growth. It showed that once you adjust for population aging, the employed share of American adults is at its highest level in decades.
Then came the Consumer Price Index, which showed inflation falling to its lowest level since spring 2021. Thanks to falling inflation, most American workers now have higher real wages than they did before the pandemic — in fact, nonsupervisory workers are earning roughly what we would have expected if the pandemic had never happened.
Economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product, came in above expectations, once again defying predictions of recession. …
… we’ve had an astonishing recovery in jobs and G.D.P., which puts the sluggish recovery of the 2010s to shame — indeed, it suggests that the failure to achieve quick recovery from the financial crisis was a huge economic tragedy.
When Biden came into office, his economists were well aware of that record and believed that the Obama administration contributed to that failure, to an economy that ran too cold for many years, by not going big enough at the beginning. So they were determined to go big this time. And until recently it was widely argued that they overcompensated, that they went too big and as a result ran the economy too hot.
Given where we are now, however, it’s much harder to argue that they hugely overdid it. Yes, there was a spike in inflation, but it has been going away. Obviously the Biden team didn’t run the economy too cold. But maybe, in the light of recent data, they didn’t run it too hot either. It would be too much to argue that Biden’s economic policy was pure Goldilocks, that they set the economic temperature just right; even given what we know now, there’s a case that the rescue plan should have been smaller. But overall, it’s starting to look as if Biden got it more or less right.