Existing vs. new home sales: sales have peaked, expect prices to soon peak I normally don’t pay much attention to existing home sales. Even though they constitute about 90% of the housing market, they have much less impact on the economy overall than new home sales (because all of the economic activity involved in building […]
Adam Smith’s been dead for more than 230 years now; Karl Marx for 138. The industrial age began around 1760; ended around 1960. Around 1950, we entered the information & technology age, an age every bit as epochal as the industrial age. Missing to date in this new age is the Adam Smith equivalent to […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 17 – 21 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The theme of a supply-constrained economic Boom continues, with the addition this past week of the national average of gas prices going over $3 a gallon for the first time since 2014, probably […]
Oil exports drop by the most on record to least since October 2018; global oil shortage at 1.73 million barrels per day, Focus on Fracking, RJS The “global oil shortage” is from my coverage of the May OPEC report, which i’ll paste below; I also revise global oil shortage/surplus estimates for prior months. I don’t […]
Big decline in new jobless claims continues, while decline in continuing claims has stalled New jobless claims continue to be the most important weekly economic datapoint, as increasing numbers of vaccinated people and outdoor activities have led to an abatement of the pandemic – both new infections and deaths are near their lowest points in […]
Further considerations on the disappointing April jobs report. Consider the averages! I’ve been threatening for a couple of weeks to run some extended comments on the big miss in the April jobs report. As there’s no economic news of note today, here goes . . . . 1. It’s possible March was the outlier rather […]
‘Cut the Bullsh*t‘ and Tax Rich People Like Us, Common Dreams, Kenny Stancil Monday is Tax Day in the United States this year and the Patriotic Millionaires—rich Americans who advocate for greater redistribution of wealth and power to working people in the U.S.—are using the occasion to launch “an offensive” against the “selfish billionaires, Wall […]
April housing permits and starts: a pullback from peak, but no recessionary signal UPDATED The monthly statistics on housing permits and starts, reported this morning, were mixed, as permits increased slightly and starts declined: The less volatile single-family permits also declined slightly.
How should we grade our collective response to the covid pandemic? What lessons should we draw for the future? I believe that our response was poor. To see why, just imagine where we would be today if effective vaccines had not been developed. Our current strategy of moderate social distancing, intermittent partial lockdowns, and economic […]
Steve Hutkins from Save the Post Office. As you can see, postal service delivery would lengthen from a maximum of 3 – day delivery to 4 and 5-day delivery service for First Class mail and Periodicals. The impact of the changes in delivery would would slow approximately 20.7 billion pieces of First Class Mail, or […]