Who Would Pay the Biggest Price for Postal Privatization? – by Sarah Anderson Institute for Policy Studies as featured at Save the Post Office (Steve Hutkins) During his first term, President Trump appointed a task force on the future of the Postal Service that included the Treasury Secretary and the Directors of the Office of Management and […]

 – by New Deal democrat Today let me address the GOP bust-out budget bill, and how that plays into Moody’s downgrade of US debt last week. And the bottom line is that, it is bad. The rubber is starting to hit the road. Let me start out with the below graph from the CBO of the […]

 – by New Deal democrat The story continues to be “same old, same old” with unemployment claims. Initial claims declined -2,000 last week to 227,000. The four week moving average rose 1,000 to 231,500. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims rose 36,000 to 1.903 million: The YoY story continues to be the same as […]

In Arizona’s Mr. Andrew Biggs is lecturing us on how Republicans are going to pass a spending bill benefiting those who do not need tax breaks to get by. Instead of cutting Defense or some other programs, Andrew along with other AZ Republicans such as Elijah James Crane will be cutting Medicaid which supports lower […]

 – by New Deal democrat A few days ago, Prof. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser posted the below graphs comparing the time that hard vs. soft data reacted to economic shocks: As you know, I have been looking at hard “high frequency” data to see if any of the effects of Tariff-palooza! have shown up yet. And […]

 – by New Deal democrat Until Thursday we are once again in a data drought this week. In the meantime, there are a few points I want to address, including the very important Moody’s downgrade of US debt. But there was one important piece of data that came out last week that I didn’t discuss yet: […]

 – by New Deal democrat In April total permits (dark blue in the graph below) declined -69,000 on an annualized basis to 1.412 million, while the less volatile single family permits (red, right scale) number declined -50,000 to 922,000. The slightly lagging and much more volatile starts number (gray, narrow) rose 22,000 to 1.361 million annualized: […]

 – by New Deal democrat Next up in today’s slew of data is retail sales. This is one of the most important indicators I look at, because it tells us so much about consumers, and since consumption leads employment, it gives us information about the trend in that as well. In April, nominally retail sales […]

Jobless claims: more of the same  – by New Deal democrat After a long data drought, there are many releases today. I’ll start with jobless claims. Initial claims were unchanged at 229,000, while the four week moving average rose 2,250 to 230,500. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims rose 9,000 to 1.881 million: […]

 – by New Deal democrat Now that we have April’s consumer inflation data, let’s update real wages for average American families. In April average hourly wages for nonsupervisory employees increased 0.3%, and aggregate payrolls for nonsupervisory employees increased 0.4%. Since CPI increased 0.2%, in real terms wages (light blue) increased 0.1% and aggregate payrolls (dark blue) […]