by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 31 – February 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There is an old market saying that “the cure for high prices is, high prices.” Well, commodity prices, and in particular industrial commodities and oil, are at new multi-year highs. The latter […]
RJS @ MarketWatch 666, Construction Spending Rose 0.2% in December after Prior Months Were Revised Higher The Census Bureau’s report on construction spending for December (pdf) estimated that the month’s seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,639.9 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 0.2 percent (± 0.8 percent)* above the revised November estimate […]
The stability and growth pact regulated the fiscal policy of Euro bloc countries. It is currently suspended, because of Covid. There is an ongoing discussion of whether to reactivate it when the epidemic ends or whether to replace it with something else. I strongly advocate eliminating it and replacing it with nothing. Very very rounghly, […]
January jobs report: huge gain in wages, huge upward revisions to past few months, limited Omicron impact Here are the three issues I was looking to see addressed in this jobs report: 1. Would last month’s “poor” 199,000 number of new jobs be revised higher? 2. Is wage growth holding up? Is it accelerating?3. In December, big […]
“What they create [in their free time] has something superfluous about it.” I am finding it difficult to proceed with writing about free time because I am not having enough opportunity to talk out these questions with people in person. (Comments on Sandwichman’s post over at Econospeak is worth a thoughtful pause and and consideration…Dan)
Green groves feed the townspeople crafting their wares for the benefit of an enlightened populace, the amber fields of grain are milled for bread for the troops to keep our sovereign democracy intact. The greatest of civilizations are measured by the strength of their army, the complexity of the structures that they construct, yet history […]
History is the study of the past. We can not undo the past; but we can make use of knowledge of the past to help us understand what is going on now so as to make the right choices, to take the right actions for issues of the present now; and to better our odds […]
December JOLTS report: with Omicron raging, the pool of potential employees refuses to fill, meaning more record wage gains The Census Bureau has started to release the JOLTS report earlier in the month. So we got December’s report yesterday as opposed to in a week or two. Last month I introduced the idea of […]
Manufacturing continues strong in January; construction continued to sag in December As usual, the first data for last month starts out with the ISM manufacturing report. This index, especially its new orders subindex, is an important short leading indicator for the production sector. In January the index declined from 58.8 to 57.6, as did the more […]
My mind goes back to 2008. I was recently tempted to ask why bad loans by banks are a public problem. I was tempted to say that the bank made the loan, so it is their problem. If enough debtors default that the bank fails, so what? Then I remember the very appealing logic of […]