Black and Brown Americans suffer the most in biggest U.S. drop in life expectancy since WWII, Modern Healthcare, June 2021 In an earlier post listing a series of articles I thought might be interesting to AB, this one Modern Healthcare article was listed as one of interest. I decided to expand on the article and […]
House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession The FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes for May and April, respectively, were released this morning. Because housing affordability is very much an issue, let’s take a look. YoY the FHFA index is up 15.7%, and the Case Shiller […]
Socially Necessary Labour Time: outline of a review I have excerpted all the passages in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value in which Marx explicitly discusses the concept of socially necessary labour time by name and will go through them in manageable chunks. My first pass through the excerpts suggests to me that 13 segments would be a reasonable […]
Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads Let’s begin this installment with a look at vaccinations by county from a different source that a reader pointed me to last week, COVIDactnow: The urban/rural and Red State/Blue State divides are pretty obvious. Conor Kelly (whose work I was highlighting one year ago) also […]
“Could it be a better result? By this, I mean should there really have been an extreme shortage and long lead times?” A fellow writer was an engineer at OnSemi. As he stated once, his job was watching the crystals (future “wafer material) grow. More coming on this comment shortly. You will not be experts […]
RJS at Marketwatch 666 reviews oil and natural gas pricing, June 28, 2021 Oil Pricing Oil prices set a new 32 month high for a fifth consecutive week, as negotiations to lift Iranian sanctions broke off and US crude supplies fell more than was expected for a fifth straight week. After rising 1% to $71.64 […]
Oedipus Marx and the Chimera of Socially Necessary Labour Time Karl Marx: “Pamphlet No. 1 ends with the statement: ‘Wealth is nothing but disposable time’” No, it doesn’t. The pamphlet Marx cited was The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. The phrase, “wealth . . . is disposable time, and nothing more,” appeared on page 5 […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 21- 25 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. All of the important metrics for the economy remain positive. But, in addition to supply chain issues, we have to start worrying about COVID again, because the delta variant has now taken hold in […]
New jobless claims stall, adding to the evidence that stalling vaccinations and case counts are having an economic effect New jobless claims have been the most important weekly economic datapoint this year, as they have correlated strongly with vaccination progress. Unfortunately, that progress has largely stalled in the past month, and now new jobless claims […]
Real personal income and spending both decline in May – but that’s OK, as it was mainly expiration of stimulus; NBER likely to declare end of recession soon The last of the 4 monthly coincident markers for whether the economy is in recession vs. expansion was reported this morning for May. Let’s take a look. […]