Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Auto Sales

Could July have been the bottom in auto sales? Auto sales jumped from 12.6 million in July to 13.7 million in August. Auto sales are nearly 20% below trend as compared to 30% below trend at the 1981 bottom and 16% below trend at the 1991 bottom. So, just maybe July was the bottom.

Employment Report

The employment report shows more of the same and no sign of an economic improvement. Compared to other economic cycles this is looking like an extended shallow near recession. But that may be the most bearish scenario. Every time employment has fallen below its year ago level the US has experienced a recession and both […]

Texas Railroad Commission

The Republicans actually have the audacity to have the Chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission as a speaker. I can not imagine a single institution in the US that is more anti-free market than the Texas Railroad Commission.

Women’s Lib is a Capitalist Plot

Women’s lib is a capitalist plot to exploit the last great source of cheap, high quality labor. OK, now that I’ve made a statement designed to be extreme and arouse controversy it is time to look at the data a little differently. In the recently released Census report on income and insurance one of the […]

Price Gouging

WOW — Hurricane Gustav has landed and I have yet to see a libertarian post arguing that Wal Mart, Home Depot and other major modern corporations will not resupply New Orleans without higher prices. Maybe they are all taking Labor Day off in honor of the Union movement.

Weakest Economic Recovery

From the Saturday NYT story by Floyd Norris. Just to preclude the comments, this is from the economic bottom, so it does not include the recession Bush inherited.

Real GDP Report

Sorry I’m slow posting this, but I was busy elsewhere yesterday. To understand the real GDP report you need to look at the monthly data. Real GDP is a measure of output. But we do not directly measure output. Rather, we measure consumption and adjust that for changes in trade and inventories to indirectly measure […]

Real Per Capita Income

Yesterdays release of real income data has received much commentary from blogger. Many ways of looking at the data and many excuses for the data have been proposed. Often I read comments about how the use of household and/or family data biased the data. And there are some validity to the comments that different ways […]

Obama and the Economy

NYT Magazine Preview: How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy This Sunday’s New York Times has a very good article on Obama by David Leonhardt.

The Depression and Post WW II Recessions

Since others agreed in the prior post that the depression chart would be better in real dollars rather than nominal dollars I though I would take this opportunity to post this chart. In business cycle analysis if you use NBER official terminology the cyle should be divided into three phases. The first is recession from […]