ISM manufacturing and residential construction spending trends continue May data has started out where April left off, with continuations of trends in both manufacturing and construction. First, manufacturing: it is still expanding, but at a much lower rate than last summer’s red hot numbers. The overall ISM manufacturing index declined a bit to 52.1, but […]
The sources of the next recession While we are waiting for the ISM May manufacturing survey and construction spending data to be released later this morning, both of which will give us important clues to Friday’s jobs report, let me write down some thoughts on the nerdy question I ruminated about this weekend: what is […]
Q1 corporate profits and real gross domestic income Yesterday the second estimate of Q1 GDP came out, which means that corporate profits for Q1 were finally reported. In my post earlier this week at Seeking Alpha, I wrote that corporate profits are of higher forecasting importance because of the contradiction in the signals being sent […]
Trucking tops ailing rail (nerdy) Since the beginning of this year, weekly rail volumes have usually been negative. The full year to date volumes have also been negative YoY: Since all manufactured goods have to be transported to market, if this is something confirmed in other transportation readings, it would clearly be recessionary – as […]
The Western Hemisphere’s portion of the Arctic looks set for a record low Given Donald Trump’s view that global warming is a hoax, I am surprised that almost 2 1/2 years into his Presidency NOAA’s “Arctic Sea Ice” page is still with us. And since I am a nerd, during the spring and summer it […]
Yes, Virginia, the government shutdown really did cause a mini-recession For the past several months, I have been pounding on the idea that the government shutdown, during which 800,000 jobholders were temporarily laid off without pay, had a much bigger impact on the economy than was originally thought. This morning we get the following graph […]
San Francisco Fed: ease of finding a new job is driving improved labor force participation This is a surprising result that is worth noting: the San Francisco Fed found that the increase in prime age labor force participation in the past five years has not been due to new people being drawn into the labor […]
A comment about the economy and the 2020 election Recently I’ve seen a bunch of takes to the effect that “the economy is doing great, and therefore it is likely that Donald Trump will be re-elected.” In my opinion that fear is overblown for three important reasons. The first, least noteworthy reason, is that there […]
Twelve Big Picture bullet points on the economy It’s a really slow week for economic data. Really the only important report is new home sales, which will be released Thursday. I’ve been working on a few things, but they are really information-dense and time-consuming to organize, and because they deal with how long leading indicators […]
Nancy Pelosi is an able tactician, but a poor strategist. She will not save the Republic A couple of years ago I read Andrew Roberts’ tome on Napoleon. As a schoolboy, Napoleon voraciously inhaled everything he could read about military conflict, including several then-recent books suggesting novel tactics. As a young general, he implemented those […]