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

Medicare4All Rallies Shows Big Support for Universal Health Care

Dan sent this article to me and I scan-read it as it is done in generalities. This not a criticism of the content as much as my pointing out it is done in brevity. The push is big for some form of Single Payer healthcare if one were to call it “insurance.” At some point […]

Housing sales decline, while price surges continue

Housing sales decline, while price surges continue So I take a little one-day road trip on my vacation and come back to find much weeping and gnashing of teeth and generalized whining about a big decline in new home sales. Well, what exactly were they expecting? The new home sales data is particularly volatile and […]

New Housing Starts Higher in June, Building Permits 5.3% Lower

RJS, MarketWatch 666, New Housing Starts Reported Higher in June, Building Permits 5.3% Lower The June report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that new housing units were being started at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,643,000 in June, which was 6.3 percent (±11.5 percent)* above the revised May estimated annual rate […]

Comments on existing home sale prices

Comments on existing home sale prices Existing home sales were reported yesterday. Since, although they are about 90% of the market, they have much less effect on the economy than new home sales, I normally don’t pay that much attention.But I did want to emerge from my vacation hideaway to make a few comments. 1. […]

Private Equity invests in “Primary Care” Medicine

I am adding a brief comment here (it fits and is on topic) rather than going back to the earlier post which I believe to be titled correctly; “Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry.” As my source of information I had identified two different articles taken from Modern Healthcare and […]

New jobless claims rise sharply; is the Delta wave beginning to take its economic toll?

New jobless claims rise sharply; is the Delta wave beginning to take its economic toll? New jobless claims are the most important weekly economic datapoint with regard to the effects of vaccination progress. At this point, it is also a test of how much the “delta wave” of new cases is setting economic progress back. […]

Why Did Trump Initially Support The Saudi-UAE Effort To Overthrow Qatar’s Government?

Why Did Trump Initially Support The Saudi-UAE Effort To Overthrow Qatar’s Government?  One of the more curious things in 2017 in the first year of the Trump presidency was how when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) placed a boycott on Qatar and more directly attempted to overthrow the government of Qatar, President […]

The Ambivalence of Verfügbare Zeit

The Ambivalence of Verfügbare Zeit Back in December I posted an excerpt from the Grundrisse, Reichtum ist verfügbare Zeit und nichts weiter, without noticing that in it was a prototype for Marx’s concept of socially necessary labour time (Gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitzeit):  Die Schöpfung von viel disposable time außer der notwendigen Arbeitszeit für die Gesellschaft überhaupt und jedes Glied derselben (d.h. […]