Commenter R.J.S. Discuses CPI Rising led by Food, Energy, and Medical The consumer price index rose 0.4% in February, as higher prices for fuel, groceries, utilities, and medical services were only partly offset by lower prices for clothing, used vehicles, and airline fares…the Consumer Price Index Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that seasonally adjusted prices […]
Coronavirus dashboard for March 8: Update on the effect of vaccinations My first post on the coronavirus was almost exactly one year ago, on March 10, 2020, “This is what exponential growth looks like,” warning that exponential spread was exactly what had started to happen in the US. We are now finally averaging the administration of […]
Initial jobless claims make further progress towards November lows Last week I “pre-debunked” the idea that a lack of reporting in Texas skewed the big decline in claims, concluding that “being very generous, the ‘real’ seasonally adjusted number of initial claims at worst probably would have been only about 30,000 higher – I.e., 760,000 – […]
Commenter RJS, MarketWatch 666 on the Goods and Services Trade Deficit. International Trade in Goods and Services, March 5, 2021 Our trade deficit rose 1.9% in January, as both the value of our exports and our imports increased, but the value of our imports increased by more…the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods […]
Disposable People Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Two important data considerations this week: (1) for the first time, some YoY comparisons – e.g., restaurant reservations – are compared with data after the onset of the pandemic. The distortions will intensify […]
Usually, lies are told for purpose. So, in most cases, if we can determine whose purpose is being served, we will know who is behind the lie. Whose interests were being served by the Confederacy during the American Civil War? Sure as heck wasn’t those of the yeomen farmers who did most of the fighting […]
Household debt and the pandemic This is something I used to pay a lot more attention to back around the time of the Great Recession. How stretched were American households in paying their monthly bills? The Federal Reserve publishes a quarterly update tracking this issue. Two of the metrics in that quarterly update are debt […]
Is There No Hope for “Muslim Social Democracy”? Probably not I am afraid. Indeed, this label is a recently cooked up one, to replace an earlier one that used “Islamist” instead of “Muslim.” The group claiming this apparently failing and declining label is the Ennadha Party of Tuinisia, founded in 1981 and still led by […]
Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at best precariously […]