– by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. It remains notable how quickly many of the short leading indicators have turned up. But there has been no discernible hit to consumption. As usual, clicking over and reading will bring you up to the virtual moment as to the state of the […]

And the billionaire grift goes on and on. “One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate […]

The simplest answer to this dilemma being they have the weakest political clout. All it would take is a large turnout of Low Income citizens to defeat Republicans. There were 50 million voters who were make <$50,000 annually who turned out in 2020. I guess the question then, is why don’t they have a larger […]

“Small town vs big city economics,” The one-handed economist How do the small rural communities still manage to exist with decent living conditions? Take for example any small rural village in a country such as Bulgaria or Croatia or South Africa with around 1,000 people. People there are working, have/self-supplied food, water, sanitation facilities, a […]

Positing that the purpose of an economy is to produce and equitably distribute the requisite goods and services for a given societal unit, that the purpose of government is to provide a societal unit essential services including a well functioning economy, that no form of either is ordained, that it is neither the duty nor […]

“A large, slow-moving gun fired at the economy and the bullet is still in the air”  – by New Deal democrat A poster named Micah on Bluesky has written “the China tariffs were a large, slow-moving gun fired at the economy and the bullet is still in the air” By this, he is referring to the […]

– by New Deal democrat The housing market has historically been led by mortgage rates. And since those have been relatively rangebound for most of the past 2.5 years in the 6%-7% range, housing permits and starts have similarly followed. This morning those trends continued. Total permits (dark blue in the graph below) increased 23,000 on […]

That people in countries on the other side of our planet will suffer because of one person who despises their existence is tragic. I subscribe to The Bangkok Post because I worked there for weeks at a time also. It is a place of wealth and a place of poverty. A couple of dollars means […]

 – by New Deal democrat Initial jobless claims continued to be well-behaved last week. Per this morning’s report, they declined -9.000 to 215,000, while the four week moving average declined -2,500 to 220,750. With the typical one week delay, continuing claims increased 41,000 to 1.885 million – which, despite the big weekly increase, is right in […]

 – by New Deal democrat The former King of Coincident Indicators, industrial production, has faded ever since the “China shock” at the beginning of the Millennium. Downturns in production almost always coincided with the onset of recessions beforehand. Since then, there have been several big downturns, in 2015-16, 2019, and a smaller one in 2023-24, […]