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

China Tariffs

Comment by Terry (Terrance Nilles) as taken from “Trump’s China tariff gambit is failing,” Angry Bear At the end of the day, I think the whole tariff thing is not about raising money to pay for tax cuts or to bring industry back to this country or to stop fentanyl from coming across the border. […]

European Leaders Arrive in Kyiv

European leaders arrive in Kyiv after Putin’s parade, Bangkok Post KYIV — The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Poland arrived in Kyiv on Saturday for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a show of unity a day after Russia’s Vladimir Putin hosted his allies in a Victory Day parade on Red Square. The […]

America’s Money Managers

Some select facts about the Treasury Department Functions. This includes the size of it, currency, national banks, costs of tax collection, budget, etc. The latter of which make the Treasury the third largest department fund wise. Some interesting graphs depicting functions. What does the Department of the Treasury do? USAFacts Last month, a federal judge […]

Trump’s China tariff gambit is failing

Trump slapped 145% tariffs on China, thinking it would hurt them more then it would hurt the US. Of course, trade is global, and so China’s exports surged in April as a result of a jump in shipments to Southeast Asia, offsetting the drop in outbound goods to the U.S. “China’s exports to the Association […]

CBO Likely Underestimates Medicaid Coverage losses

Looking at the impact of Mike Johnson and the House proposal of cutting Medicaid will have an impact. Meanwhile, Trump is expecting cuts so as to keep the 2017 tax cuts of which a major portion went to the upper one-percent in income. Estimate “seems low” — KFF’s Larry Levitt, Brookings‘ Matt Fiedler, and Georgetown’s […]

New jobless claims well-behaved, but continuing claims trend higher

 – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims returned to a well-behaved range this week, down -13,000 to 228,000. The four week moving average was in line, increasing 1,000 to 227,000. Continuing claims, with the typical one week delay, declined -37,000 to 1.879 million, which is still near the top end of their 12 month range: […]

Leading employment sectors from the April jobs report – no definitive signs of peaking

 – by New Deal democrat Let’s take a belated look at some of the more important datapoints that came out of last Friday’s employment report for April. To start with, as I’ve mentioned numerous times, frequently service jobs (blue in the graph below) continue increasing all the way through recessions. It is goods producing jobs (red) […]

Prices and unemployment – Up. The rest of the economy adjusting downward

Some old guy handed over a damaged economy in January. The economy was definitely in a failure mode. The economy is heading into very bad weather. Brace yourselves. “Prices and unemployment are heading up. Everything else is going down,” Robert Reich Today, the Federal Reserve decided to leave interest rates where they are, at 4.25 […]

Winning

“A drop in Canada-U.S. travel has led Calgary-based WestJet to cancel more flights south of the border. “The airline says it is suspending flights from Vancouver to Austin until October. “Flights to other destinations, including Orlando, Los Angeles and Chicago will also be halted at different times between June and August. “WestJet says it is […]