Before we get to carried away about the impact of the weak dollar on US trade, and especially exports I suggest we look at some recent history. See the previous post. This chart has the dollar inverted, so remember the dollar was strong in the 1990s and weak since 2000. What this shows is that […]
For the last several years there has been a conservative, libertarian meme that the drop in the savings rate did not matter because the growth in the value of peoples homes substituted for savings.Even if this was good economics to begin with and did not ignore the point that wealth is a stock and savings […]
Retail sales were reported down 0.1%, but that included gasoline and groceries. If you take them out nominal retail sales fell -0.4%. On a year over year basis real retail sales growth is sitting right about zero. The BEA deflator data will not be available until the end of the month but I made a […]
CORRECTION: If two observations are removed from the non-Presidential election years sample the difference between the seasonal pattern in election years and non-election years essentially disappears. This implies that the perceived market manipulation probably did not occur. Why do gasoline prices display a different seasonal pattern in presidential election years? Most people know that gas […]
I’m going to try a Cactus post and look at the Bush record. On 11 June 2004 Milton Friedman published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Editorial page called Freedom’s Friend. In the article he used the number of pages in the Federal Register each year as a measure of government interference in […]
What is it with normally reasonable republicans that when it comes to the Windfall Profits Tax that makes them become completely unreasonable and accept the republican spin machine bull about it. I keep seeing at various blogs the claim that the 1980s windfall profits tax caused oil production to fall when the facts clearly show […]
Did you notice. Obama mentioned selling oil out of the strategic oil reserve and the price of oil fellalmost $5. That is a bigger drop than suspending the federal gasoline tax would produce. Man, I wonder how the Republicans are going to give Bush credit for this drop. Of course, It could not have happened […]
In earlier post 2slugs comments about teen employment got me to look at the data. 2slugs pointed out that in June all the drop in employment was teens as employment of over 25s actually rose. He was right, but as I looked at the data what it shows is this seems to be a normal […]
Compared to other cycles the drop in employment this cycle looks perfectly normal, as it is right on the average of the four pre-1990 cycles. The real question is how long employment continues to fall and there was little or nothing in the recent economic data to suggest that employment is on the verge of […]
Earlier today in discussing auto prices I’m afraid I did not explain myself very well.Let me use actual data and see if I can do better. Because the CPI is quality adjusted what it is showing is the price of buying an earlier model car, if you could. In the chart above I set the […]