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

Pharmaceuticals, Drug Stores. and PBMs

What private equity typically does when they buy into a company in trouble? Typically, they will strip a company of assets. What Matt is writing about is the application of public utility rules to control their methods of business, Rules are not open to interpretation as are laws. I have not seen this piece by […]

Navigating The Medicaid Healthcare System

A lengthy piece with plenty of diagrams to assist in understanding. This brief gauges Medicaid enrollees’ perspectives on their health insurance, based on findings from KFF’s Survey of Consumer Experiences with Health Insurance, fielded February 21 through March 14, 2023. “A Look at Navigating the Health Care System: Medicaid Consumer Perspectives,” KFF – by Amaya […]

Real retail sales turn down monthly and YoY in December, boding poorly for employment

– by New Deal democrat Real retail sales, one of my favorite broad-economy indicators, was updated through December this morning — still stale by one month, as under normal circumstances January’s numbers would have been released this week.  Still, with consumer spending being about 70% of the entire economy, this is one of the most […]

Tariffs Bite into Tax Refunds

Erica York (VP Tax Foundation) discusses how the Trump tariffs will cut into the income tax relief for all tax brackets due. Read on . . . We’ve spent a lot of time in this newsletter tracking the surge in tariff revenue over the past year. Now it’s tax filing season, and those two stories are colliding. Recent […]

Expect shelter inflation to continue abating in the next few CPI reports

– by New Deal democrat There’s no significant economic news until Wednsday’s jobs report, as to which Scott Bessent gave an interview this morning on CNBC which amounted to, “Don’t Panic!!!” Which I am sure inspires confidence in everybody (I’ve been expecting downward revisions to much of last year as part of the annual benchmarking, so […]

Some Reads for a Sunday

Joel and I went through some articles in our email boxes(?) and thought they may make good reads for a Sunday. Too much to post on Angry Bear. Maybe Sunday reads. Comment section is open for any thoughts you may have related to a particular article (please mention which one). You can use this as […]

December JOLTS report stabilizing at near stall speed, despite one negative “soft data” outlier

 – by New Deal democrat I’m glad I waited a day to write about yesterday’s JOLTS report for December, because I got to read a lot of other commentary on the report, which convinced me to add some additional commentary about the entire JOLTS series.  Let’s start with the fact that it was not “stale” inasmuch […]