– by New Deal democrat I’ll keep today’s report on construction spending brief. The important part of this metric is residential construction spending, another proxy for housing. On a nominal basis, in March residential construction spending (red) declined -0.4%, while total construction spending (blue) declined -0.5%: These are hardly terrible declines. BUT, the price of […]

Trade Balances: It’s the Spending, Stupid by Steve Roth Wealth Economics This post is dedicated to my sister, who (bless her heart) really follows the financial press and etc. and tries to understand things. She called me up kind of flummoxed by all this tariff/trade talk recently, and now IMO has a super-good basic understand […]

The Snap cuts coming from a rather large president who over eats, just seems wrong to me. But, with this Snidely Whiplash as the President, one can be certain cuts will occur where they should not occur. My apology to Snidely, I meant Trump. Right now? Pres. Trump is thinking of cutting back on the […]

The “just in time” model is supposed to make supply chains more efficient by minimizing warehousing and storage. The current Trump tariffs are doing violence to the JIT model: “Trade experts say that companies have stockpiled enough inventory in recent months that, if the White House reverses course soon and significantly drops tariffs on China, […]

 – by New Deal democrat My question over the past year had been whether “decleration” into a “soft landing”would turn into “deterioration” towards a recession. That has now been overtaken by events in the form of T—-p‘s tariffs and trade wars. So my focus now is looking for hard data, rather than reports of sentiment, […]

My brother Mike is a retired mechanical engineer. He emailed me this morning and reminded me of a New Yorker article we had both read years ago and pointed me to a fascinating youtube video that retells the story. In a nutshell, the Citicorp building in Manhattan was a triumph of architectural innovation in its […]

There are changes coming to the Medicare market place and Medicare Advantage. Healthcare Insurance companies are leaving the Medicare Advantage market. “Market exits by Humana, Aetna, and UnitedHealthcare will collectively affect nearly 70% of those 1.8 million individuals.” The remainder of the 1.8 million will be looking at new plans with the same insurance provider. […]

The Age of Dis-Enlightenment “It takes an ignorant man to lead an ignorant throng,”  w/ deepest apologies to Woody, the Kingston Trio et al.   Dumb — yeah but, they are the epitome of dis-enlightenmenters.  Dissers here, there,  everywhere back during The Age of Enlightenment.  But, then was 200-350 years ago when it was new and […]

  – by New Deal democrat [Note: I’ll report separately on construction spending, also released this morning] Although manufacturing is of diminishing importance to the economy, (it was in deep contraction both in 2015-16 and again in 2022 without any recession), the ISM manufacturing index remains an important indicator with a 75+ year history of accurately describing […]

Can Trump cut Government spending even more? Yes, he probably could. It would be detrimental to the United States citizens. It appears we concerns about spending exceeding tax receipts in 2025 and creating deficits. There is a solution to all of this. Passed under Reconciliation, Trumps Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was to pay for […]