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

The range-bound new home sales market continues

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog As per my usual caveat, while new home sales are the most leading of the housing construction metrics, they are noisy and heavily revised.  That was true again this month, as sales (blue in the graph below) increased almost 9% m/m to 693,000 annualized, after February was revised downward […]

Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done for Veterans?

by Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early Washington Monthly Trump has mocked veterans and privatized their health care. Biden honors them but hasn’t challenged Trump’s privatization policies. Currently, they are moving more and more veterans to commercial healthcare. This rather than restoring VA healthcare to a better place for veterans to be and at a lower […]

Real median wage and income growth through March continued the recent increasing trend

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog This is an update of some information I last posted several months ago. Real median household income is one of the best measures of average Americans’ well-being. However, the official measure is only reported once a year, in September of the following year. So right now the most […]

Former Shell employees resurrect dead well in ‘monumental’ move for geothermal energy

by Laurelle Stelle msn.com, The Cool Down Nice read on geothermal energy produced from pumping water into fracked rock formations in deep dry oil wells. In Texas, several innovative new companies are combining clean energy technology and the expertise of former oil and gas industry employees to create a whole new generation of geothermal power plants, Grist reported. […]

New Deal democrats Weekly Indicators for April 15 – 19 2024

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog I neglected to put this up Saturday, so here it is now. My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. There continues to be a fair amount of churn and noise in the short leading and coincident time range. Nevertheless, the underlying theme is one of positivity. Aside […]

Sovereign citizens

Visiting writer’s commentary on Sovereign Citizens by Infidel753 from his own Blog of similar name. Readers may be unfamiliar with the “sovereign citizen” movement, a fringe ideological belief system which asserts (for complex, fatuous, and extremely boring reasons) that certain everyday laws either do not exist, are not real laws, or at least don’t apply […]

The bifurcation of the new vs. existing home markets continues

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog The bifurcation of the new vs. existing home markets continued in March, per the report on existing home sales and prices yesterday. Remember that, unlike existing homeowners, house builders can vary square footage, amenities, lot sizes, and offer price and/or mortgage incentives to counteract the effect of […]

Ancient lone elm the Last Ent is ‘guardian’ to new trees

BBC and unknown author msn.com/BBC This kind of kool and interesting. An ancient lone wych elm whose remote Highland location has protected it from Dutch elm disease has been joined by dozens of seedlings for the first time in hundreds of years. The elm – dubbed the Last Ent of Glen Affric – was Scotland’s Tree […]