Nobody is (still) getting laid off [Note: This Nov. 10th consumer inflation report was very important, and not in a good way. So I plan on doing a more extensive post on it tomorrow, and I’ll probably put off the next “Coronavirus Dashboard” by Friday.] Initial claims declined another 4,000 this week to 267,000, and […]
Producer price inflation: it’s a gas! I normally do not pay much attention to producer prices, but with the huge increase in spending earlier this year and the ensuing supply bottlenecks taking center stage, the course of inflation has emerged as the most pressing economic issue. To recap briefly, with the second round of pandemic […]
Others are calling October at 8.6% equal to September’s record, but adding additional decimal points shows October +8.6265% clearly higher than September’s +8.5931% “Record 8.6% Annual Increase in October Producer Price Index; Record 14.2% Increase for Final Demand Goods, and a 46 year Record for Prices of Intermediate Goods,” RJS, MarketWatch 666 The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final […]
Infrastructure week: organs of the human brain, created by the human hand Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it […]
Farmer and Economist Michael Smith In this AgDaily piece, they do a great job of outlining the history of agriculture and sort of where it is headed, pretty much the same as it always has been, with a few caveats. Over time it has gotten much harder and now even more so with equipment prices […]
Focus on Fracking: gasoline supplies lowest since November 2017 despite gasoline production above prepandemic levels; Focus on Fracking, Commenter and Blogger RJS US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending October 29th indicated that after a modest increase in our oil production and only minor changes to our oil imports, our […]
MarketWatch 666: Commenter and Blogger RJS; October’s jobs report; September’s trade deficit, construction spending, and factory inventories, et al Major economic reports that were released the past week included the Employment Situation Summary for October from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and three September reports that included metrics which were either estimated or included in last week’s […]
Money Illusion in the Twenty-First Century The starting point for any consideration of inflation is that wages (and interest, profits, and rents) are prices. Every transaction has two sides, and one person’s price is another’s income. In the aggregate, leaving aside international complications, inflation can’t have either a negative or positive effect on aggregate real […]
Capital itself is the moving contradiction The phrase quoted in the title is probably the most well-known in the Grundrisse. It has been cited in books and journal articles at least a hundred times, an order of magnitude more frequently than the alternative translation found in the collected works, “capital itself is a contradiction-in-process,” It is […]
October jobs report: a very strong report putting to rest questions about the strength of the expansion In the light of the last two month’s relatively “poor” jobs readings, an important question was what was going to happen with revisions. As we will see below, they really delivered! – big positive revisions to both of […]