(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis wrote an excellent retrospective on the career of Paul Ryan‘He was the future of the party’: Ryan’s farewell triggers debate about his legacy They are quite harsh, but not, I think, quite harsh […]

by New Deal democrat The Fed scrapes Scylla after careening into Charybdis In the past several years, I have described the Fed as trying to steer in between the Scylla of a yield curve inversion and the Charybdis of higher rates wounding the housing market.Recently several trends have reversed. This offers some relief to housing, […]

by New Deal democrat The Transportation Slowdown Well over 100 years ago, Charles Dow (he of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) posited a theory that industrial and transportation stock prices should move in tandem. Why? Because everything that factories produced had to be transported to market for delivery. So it is of interest that FedEx said […]

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for December 10 -14 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. A decline in mortgage rates unsurprisingly appears to have caused a rush in applications to lock in those rates. Plus one more anomaly ….

Real retail sales very positive; industrial production decent Real retail sales for November, together with the revisions for October, were very positive. While November sales, both nominally and adjusted for inflation, increased +0.2%, October sales were revised upward to a nominal +1.1%. On an inflation adjusted basis, that translates to +0.8%. As a result, as […]

Via NPR on the Arctic: The Arctic has experienced the “most unprecedented transition in history” in terms of warming temperatures and melting ice, and those changes may be the cause of extreme weather around the globe, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2018 Arctic Report Card. The annual report released Tuesday says rapid warming over […]