Housing continues to surge

Low interest rates continue to fuel a strong upsurge in new housing construction.

I’ll put up a more detailed post later, but for now simply note that housing permits, both overall and for the less volatile single family housing component, made new expansion highs, at levels not seen since 2007. Housing starts backed off from December – but to only the second highest numbers of the entire expansion.

Here’s the graph from the Census Bureau:

This is extremely bullish for the economy at the end of this year and into next year.

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What Is “Democratic Socialism”?

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Bloomberg’s Plan for Reskilling America: The Quid without the Pro Quo

The Intercept usefully preports Michael Bloomberg’s proposals for higher education, focusing on plans to upgrade workforce skills along the lines desired by employers.  Here’s the selection they excerpted that covers this, worth reading carefully:

There’s a lot here that would be useful to businesses located in the US if they want to take advantage of it: money for vocational degrees geared to business needs, improved credentialing for these degrees, and support for internships and similar on-the-job training programs.  As the language of the press prelease makes clear, businesses would play a determining role in deciding what is worthy of being learned, how instruction and work experience would be carried out, what criteria would be used to ascertain skill acquisition, and how credentials would be standardized for use in an economy where workers primarily move horizontally across employers.  Some of this is based on a partial reading of the German apprenticeship system, where businesses work closely with education and training institutions to promote similar types of skills.

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The Philly Fed state-by-state diffusion index of economic expansion

This comes from the Philly Fed’s state-by-state coincident index, via Bill McBride. The graph below shows the number of states showing increasing economic activity:

In December the number of states in expansion was 39. Historically over the past 40 years, that number dropping to 35 or below has (with the exception of one month in 1986) been the marker of the onset of a recession.

Note the number is below the lowest level from 2015-16, in which weakness was generally confined to the Oil patch. It is yet another marker of a slowdown, but not of a recession.

Later this morning we’ll get the January ISM manufacturing report, and over the next 48 hours we’ll get reports on January auto and truck sales. Both of these will help tell us if the weakness in the production sector has been spreading or not.

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Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: January 28, 1869

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December 2019 real personal income and spending

Real personal income and spending are both coincident indicators. They don’t tell us where the economy is going, but they do give us a snapshot of how ordinary Americans are doing.

In December, real income declined by less than -0.1%. Real spending rose by less than +0.1%:

Figure 1

Real personal spending excluding government transfer payments is one of the four indicators used by the NBER to determine if the economy is in recession or not. In December this was flat. Overall in 2019 there was a slow uptrend:

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by Dale Coberly

A few years ago, now getting to be many years ago, I solved a crime. Not because I was a Great Detective, but because I happened to be standing across the street where I saw it committed and took the number of the getaway car. Since then I have tried to tell the police what I saw, but they don’t want to hear about it.

I don’t want to go too far with this parable, just wanted to let you know in advance that I don’t claim to be smarter than anyone else, but what I am talking about is not an opinion and is a verifiable fact.

So back to facts. Sometime in the late 1990’s I heard on public radio (“radio for intelligent people”) an expert claiming that Social Security was bankrupt, a huge burden that was going to crush the taxpayers, especially the young.

Intuitively that didn’t seem very likely to me. How much could it cost to pay for the basic needs of retired people? I did a few calculations and saw that it wasn’t likely to be very much and certainly not unreasonable.

The simple equation to set some parameters goes something like this: If you expect to live twenty years after you can no longer work, and you can live . . . comfortably . . . on about 40% of what you were making while you were working . . . the kids are grown, the house is paid for, you don’t need expensive vacations . . . you can save enough money while you are working for forty years (age 25 to 65) by putting away 20% of your wages:

20% of wages times 40 years equals 40% of wages times 20 years

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Everybody’s Talkin’ ‘Bout Taxes–especially Wealth Taxes and Mark-to-Market of Capital Gains

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Guns and Commas

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(Dan here,,,at lunch the other day a friend asked about the great prices for stocks.  This post by Thomas Palley caught my attention as a well written post on the nuances between stocks and finance and the 80% who do not own many stocks and the economy of losers and winners. )

by Thomas Palley  (re-posted)

A Stock Market Boom is Not the Basis of Shared Prosperity

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