Jobless claims: huge upward revisions for the second week in a row The story this week is the repeated massive upward revisions to last week’s numbers This week, on a unadjusted basis, new jobless claims declined by 5,702 to 862,351. Seasonally adjusted claims increased by 13,000 to 861,000 (meaning last week’s original number of 793,000 […]
Blockbuster January retail sales presage gains in jobs (Dan here…late posting) [NOTE: I’ll report separately on industrial production later this morning. Real retail sales is my bellwether for the health of the consumer. And after 3 months of declines, we got a huge upturn in January. Before adjusting for inflation, retail sales jumped 5.3% – […]
Industrial production continues strong growth If real retail sales (reported on in the prior post) is the best proxy for the health of the consumer, Industrial production, the King of Coincident Indicators, is the same for production. And the news there was also very good. Overall production rose 0.9% in December, and the manufacturing component […]
Steve Hutkins at Save The Post Office, The 2020 Mail Delays: Stats & Charts Preface The inventor of MRPII, Oliver Wight, coined a term for management deliberately obstructing the implementation of MRPII calling them “Cement Heads.” In Louis DeJoy’s case, rather than work with today’s postal system; DeJoy is deliberately sabotaging it with his changes. […]
Initial and continued jobless claims: signs that the worst of the pandemic related layoffs may be behind us Some – very relative – good news in unemployment claims this week. It looks like the recent increase in new claims has peaked, while continued claims continue to decline. With new daily infections, still horrible at 100,000/day, […]
Is Bitcoin Really Real Money? Ontological and Epistemological Questions The movement to make Bitcoin into a de facto form of money has taken a step forward when Elon Musk declared that he would be purchasing over a billion btc. Some are claiming that Musk did this to pump up an alternative asset because Tesla stock […]
Normalizing Foreign Trade Relations The Biden admin has not yet made moves to undo elements of Trump’s trade war, and some parts of it may not get undone, perhaps especially some directed at China. But at least one move towards normalization with the rest of the world has just happened as the Biden admin has […]
Before Science, treating the symptoms of an illness was all we had. Along our way, using trial and error, we found a few things that worked. The big breakthroughs came when we started to look for the causes of an illness. The association of an illness with toxins was deducible. Then, as we knew more […]
Several comments on my last post on the economic difficulties of the people who attacked the Capitol took aim at their characters in one way or another. I certainly do not want to defend the Capitol invaders in any way. I think they should be vigorously prosecuted. However, it is critically important to step back […]
Is Bitcoin Really Real Money? Ontological and Epistemological Questions The movement to make Bitcoin into a de facto form of money has taken a step forward when Elon Musk declared that he would be purchasing over a billion btc. Some are claiming that Musk did this to pump up an alternative asset because Tesla stock […]