“So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department,” wrote former Republican representative from Illinois and now anti-Trump activist Joe Walsh. “Weird, huh?” AB: More […]
The Big Picture of the housing market, and its almost complete bifurcation, in 3 easy graphs – by New Deal democrat I want to spend some time commenting on the broader issue of why the public perceives inflation is still rampant, even though almost all official measures show it rapidly decelerating, and even completely absent […]
The myth of markets How is it that a market created by Madison Avenue becomes prescient? Omniscient? It doesn’t. It isn’t; never was. Like capitalism, the primacy of private healthcare and the myth of markets are a big lie. The planet is dying from our burning of fossil fuels, yet we hear ‘news readers’ demand […]
With sales near 25 year lows, the huge divergence between the existing and new home markets continues – by New Deal democrat The drastic bifurcation between the new and existing home markets continues. Existing home sales fell to 4.04 million annualized in August, the lowest level of the entire past 10+ years except for last […]
Restaurant fires back at NYT columnist after he complained about the cost of his meal: ‘Keep drinking buddy,’ Fox News, Gabriel Hays. When does a smoked burger by a reputable restaurant cost $78? When you add 4 drinks to the bill along with the $17 burger. No word on the tip left by New York […]
Initial jobless claims: unresolved seasonality obscures cautionary YoY comparisons – by New Deal democrat For the last few weeks, I have been highlighting that there is likely some unresolved post-pandemic seasonality in the initial claims numbers. That certainly looked like the case this week, as a sharp decline mirrored a similar sharp decline 52 weeks […]
Using the stock market and unemployment as an easy and timely coincident recession indicator – by New Deal democrat My fellow forecaster Bob Dieli has a measure he calls “DeltaDelta,” basically an average of the YoY% change in the stock market and the unemployment rate (which hopefully he won’t mind me mentioning here). It called to mind […]
A few years back, my chairman was a big enthusiast of NFTs (nonfungible tokens). In one conversation I recall, I pointed to a picture of the founding chair of the department and suggested he could digitize it and sell it to alumni as an NFT. He said he thought that was a good idea. When […]
People tend to say things are bad and getting worse. They tend to get irritated when I note that the thing they mentioned is bad but has recently become less bad. There is some deep unwillingness to accept that levels, changes, and rates of change are different. Certainly people will argue that something is too […]
The long awaited downturn in multi-family construction may finally have happened – by New Deal democrat With the relative fading of manufacturing in importance to the US economy, the leading construction sector has assumed even greater importance. And the most important data about construction are the leading, and long leading, data about residential housing construction. […]