Asymmetric Whining This is not news, but yet again we see the old phenomenon of people whining a lot when something gets worse but then saying nothing when it gets better. The latest example of that involves gasoline prices. They were rising and got into the range of near-real highs seen in times like 2008, […]
RJS, MarketWatch 666, Summary: US Trade Deficit Virtually Unchanged in February, Near Record High US trade deficit ticked lower February, as both our exports and imports increased, but the value of our exports rose slightly more than the value of our imports did . . . the Commerce Department report on our international trade in goods […]
The current situation is that Russia has abandoned the effort to capture Kiev. Russian forces have been withdrawn from North Central Ukraine and are now operating on an arc from Kharkiv (North East) to Kherson (South Central). So far, Ukraine has won amazing victories and Russia has suffered astonishing defeats. The extreme surprise suggests that […]
In the Paul Krugman vs. Nate Silver cage match, I’m on Team Nate Prof. Paul Krugman and Nate Silver got into a dust-up earlier this week about why so many voters seem to have soured on the Democrats. So that you don’t have to go digging through all the Twitter detritus, Alternet has a good write-up copying all […]
The Obsolescence of Nostalgia As the crow flies, it is around 200 kilometers from Michilimakinac, where Kandiaronk’s Wyandot people settled in 1671, when he was around twenty years old, to Tehkummah on Manitoulin Island where Isabel Paterson was born 215 years later. It gets even cozier because the Wyandot had been displaced from the south shore […]
I am interested in inflation expectations (acting like a macroeconomist for a change). In particular I am thinking about something Brad DeLong just tweeted. He says his subjective probability of sustained inflation due to expected inflation causing current inflation is still just 40% Why “.only a 40% chance …? Because bond markets expect the Fed […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. After several weeks of tightening and then inversion, the yield curve in the US Treasury market un-inverted in a big way this past week – via higher long term rates which drove mortgage […]
If readers are wondering what is the US doing to alleviate the rising prices of oil during the pandemic and the Russian invasion, RJS has written a good summation of what is going on in the US and where we might be during the drawdown of the SPR. It is dense reading due to the […]
The avian influenza does not seem to be letting up with multiple states reporting cases, including Texas. Here is the current map of reported cases. The USDA and USGS have been doing a good job of tracking and confirming cases through APHIS, and the surprising news that has all of us in the poultry business […]
Benchmark revisions, oh my! Four week average of jobless claims makes all-time 55 year series low The DoL made revisions to the last five years of jobless claims, in particular revising the seasonal adjustments, and the differences are eye-popping. Last week initial claims (blue) were reported at 202,000. With the revisions, they are now 171,000! […]