by New Deal democrat Why the revised Q2 GDP report next week may be the most important release in 10 years Last Thursday there were major backward revisions to unit labor costs. Since corporate profits deflated by unit labor costs are a long leading indicator, this had a big negative effect on the forecast for […]
Cheerleading for Austerity Not content to follow a news strategy that maximizes Trump’s prospects for re-election, the New York Times leads today with a story that combines economic illiteracy and reactionary scaremongering in a preview of what we’re likely to see in the 2020 presidential race. “Budget Deficit Is Set to Surge Past $1 Trillion” screams the headline, […]
I’ll just post this link and let it speak for itself. Truckers voted for Trump in droves. Now they say his trade war is ‘killing’ their ability to make a living. Its starts wtih: Morris Coffman has been a truck driver for 35 years. And he’s been a conservative for even longer than that — […]
It is standard analysis to see real and nominal imports as a share of GDP quoted to estimate the importance of imports in the economy. Currently that shows nominal imports are about 15% of GDP and real imports are some 18% of real GDP. But I suspect that this comparison understates the role of imports […]
I wrote a post with this title which is poor, solitary, nasty, and long over at Robert’s stochastic thoughts. the bottom line is I say Friedman was always a Keynesian except for his insistence that the effect of the nominal interest rate on money demand is more or less pretty much negligible. This means that […]
Many of the photos were taken before water and air pollution were fully regulated. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, and the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. Baltimore, Birmingham, Cleveland, Delaware, Denver, Kansas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco all feature here, in shots filled […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for August 12 – 16 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The data continues to be dominated by a steep decline in long term interest rates. These have both inverted further portions of the yield curve and reinvigorated the housing market. As usual, clicking […]
Positive July housing permits and starts The housing starts and permits report this morning for July adds to the positive data looking forward to H2 2020 (or, possibly, less bad – but that’s another discussion). First, here are overall permits (red) and starts (blue): While the very volatile starts declined, the slightly more forward looking […]
Industrial production, jobless claims, and retail sales As I noted this morning, a slew of important data was released. Let me deal with the “normal” weekly and monthly data in this post. First, industrial production continues to languish, down significantly from the end of last year, whether measured in total or just as to manufacturing: […]
Quick hits on a major Thursday economic news blitz There has been a ton of significant economic news this morning. I’m not going to be able to get to all or even most of it in depth. So I am going to leave a quick rundown here. Starting with the positive: -nominal retail sales up […]