Weekly Indicators: All Timeframes Positive Despite Increase in Oil Prices Despite oil prices heading back north of $80/barrel this past week, the underlying fundamentals in all time frames remain positive, including most importantly consumer spending. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the […]
This post can be found on Steve Hutkins’ Save The Post Office. He is featuring a commentary taken from the Democracy Docket as linked to in the first paragraph. As is typical, this commentary is all about Pres. Donald Tr__p who is trying his hardest to block the upcoming election or impede it in whatever […]
What Brian is touching upon is the end of a government program providing loans in rural areas for housing. To be specific, the object was providing below-market-rate loans to private and nonprofit developers who build and manage residential housing for low-income residents in small towns and rural counties. It also kept the rent to 30% […]
I recently read a history and a biography that are both centered on the American Revolution. It reminded me that for the founding fathers, the ineluctable reality was that they were risking their lives for their beliefs. Josh Marshall has a piece up at TPM about Trump’s effort to extort control over the 2026 elections, […]
– by New Deal democrat Let’s take a look at retail sales, especially real retail sales, one of my favorite economic indicators, which was updated for June this morning. This is because consumer spending is about 70% of the economy, and also because historically consumption leads employment. Let’s see what happened during a month that gas […]
Just some simple logic. It is easy enough to blame Tr__p for the decrease in Medicare insolvency. It is his bill which is driving the issue as well as well as other funding issues. Funding issues is no surprise as healthcare costs increased over the years. However, Congress could have acted to resolve the issue […]
I taught medical students for over 30 years. The bar to admission at Saint Louis University Medical School was pretty high for metrics like GPA and MCAT scores. But as a professor, I realized that crossing those bars was no guarantee of sound judgement. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s CDC director nominee, wasn’t a SLUSOM grad*, but […]
Confessions of a deeply embarrassed American. Politics and Prejudices and other musings – Jack Lessenberry July 1 was Canada Day, the official celebration of Canada’s birth as a nation, and for the second time in three years, I went to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, to celebrate and watch the fireworks from my hotel on St. […]
It’s another example of how we are in this weird and uncanny political moment in which Trump’s politics have broken free of the constraints of public opinion. (It’s reminiscent of a mob bust-out where you rapidly strip a business of its value with no concern for the future because you’re just going to burn it […]
“Producer price declines are ‘less good’ than consumer price declines, and on net that’s ‘bad‘” – by New Deal democrat I pay a lot less attention to producer prices than to consumer prices. Partly that is because in the past few decades, the PPI has tended to be coincident with the CPI rather than leading […]