– by New Deal democrat In my conclusion last month, I wrote “In the first two months of Q2, total real spending has declined by -0.8%, while services has been basically unchanged. If there is a further decline in June, based on the above discussion that would likely trigger a “recession watch” signal.” To cut to […]

I was distraught when Trump won the presidency in 2016 because the economy had recovered from the last Republican President’s recession, Hillary was a competent and experienced politician and Trump was a racist buffoon, but I held out some hope that Trump would not be as bad as I feared. I chalked up his win […]

I too would call this a history lesson. Read on, it is interesting how these events were perceived. I was around then watching all of this unflod. Civil Discourse The Voting Rights Act Turns 60 Alabama, June 11, 1963. An American president deployed federalized National Guardsmen to help implement  Brown v. Board, the desegregation case. […]

 – by New Deal democrat Last week I suggested that there might have been a break in the trend of higher YoY jobless claims, but there was not enough evidence yet. It is fair to say that this week’s report supplied that evidence. Initial claims declilned another -4,000 to 217,000, the lowest weekly number since mid-April. […]

This piece deserves a descriptive header by me. I will try . . . “first-term tax cuts) outweighed his concerns” Concerns by Hawley about what? People losing healthcare or concerns Trump will banish him and pick on him? The number also keep changing. An ~ 10 million people will lose access to US funded healthcare […]

– by New Deal democrat As we get towards the end of the month, the data from the important leading housing sector begins to be reported. This morning’s report on housing permits, starts, and construction continues the trend that has been in place for several years. For the month, permits (gold in the graph below) […]

The death knell for creationism was sounded in the 19th century, with the recognition of an ancient earth and Darwin’s Origin of Species showing that all life on earth is related by descent. A particular obsession of creationists is the idea that humans and apes descended from a common ancestor. With the advent of protein […]

David Zetland, The one-handed economist The US dollar (USD) is the world’s currency of exchange, debt investment, and reserve currency. These different roles are often merged in our heads because they’ve been synonymous for decades, but the wheels are falling off and those roles — I think — will unbundle. I’m going to explain, but […]

The words “socialism” and “Marxism” have long been synonymous with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Oddly, because neither country was socialist or Marxist. Lenin and the Bolsheviks (bolshevik means “majoritarian,” even though it was a minority party, a triumph of propaganda) crushed Marxist/socialist worker-led organizations after the 1917 Revolution (really a […]

– by New Deal democrat Last month the new orders components of the economically weighted ISM manufacturing and services indexes warranted the hoisting of a yellow flag “Recession Watch.”  This month that continued. To recap, because manufacturing is much less important to the economy than in the decades before the Millennium, the economically weighted average of the […]