Time was when being able to read and write was good enough to meet the demands of industry. After a while, workers needed to have an eighth grade, then a high school education to be of much value. That was then, back before the world became complicated. Today, in order to understand what is going […]

Yet another new 50+ year low in continuing jobless claims After 3 days of a data desert, today there is a cornucopia of data: not just initial claims, but housing starts and permits, and industrial production as well. On top of that, a large stretch of the yield curve in the bond market is close […]

Real retail sales for February: not recessionary, but not healthy either Let’s take a look at the February update for one of my favorite indicators, real retail sales. For the past few months, I have suspected that a sharp deceleration beginning with the consumer sector of the economy was more likely than not. At the moment, […]

Real wages for nonsupervisory employees make 19 month low, but no recession signaled Yesterday’s CPI report showed that prices increased 0.8% in February. Meanwhile, the jobs report indicated that average hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers increased 0.3%, so real hourly wages declined -0.5% for the month: As shown in the above graph, real wages had […]

Today’s lesson: never simply project the current trend forward An important reason why I am so insistent on dividing data into long leading, short leading, and coincident indicators is in order to avoid the most common pitfall in any forecasting, which is that of projecting the current trend forward. This morning PPI for February was […]

Marx’s “most realistic… most amazing insight!” In his farewell lecture at Brandeis University, “Obsolescence of Socialism,” Herbert Marcuse quoted a passage from the Grundrisse and claimed that in Capital, Marx had “repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!” As large-scale industry advances, the creation of real wealth depends increasingly less on […]

I just finished Robert Service’s biography of Lenin. The “Marxism” of Lenin was not Marxist at all. Classical Marxism holds that capitalism must achieve a high level of industrialization before the workers can overturn the landlords and factory owners and collectivize the fruits of labor for the benefit of workers. Like Mao, Lenin retrofitted socialist […]

by Joseph Joyce The Restructuring of Sovereign Debt The economic repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be devastating for many countries that have yet to recover from the pandemic. Higher prices for commodities, particularly energy and food, will increase inflation rates and widen trade deficits for those nations that import those items. Increases in […]

RJS; MarketWatch 666, Covered here is everything having a major price change. This includes the 2.4% increase in the price index for men’s underwear, the 3.8% increase in the price index for women’s underwear, and also prices for what are now more than 40 items having a double-digit year over year increase. CPI Rose 0.8% […]

Another big increase in consumer prices in February, as the yield curve tightens Consumer prices increased 0.8% in January, the fourth time in five months that it has exceeded 0.5%. YoY inflation is now 7.9%, the highest rate since 1982. My favorite measure, CPI ex energy, is also up 6.6% YoY, the worst since the 1981-82 recession […]