February consumer inflation begins to heat up a little Seasonally adjusted consumer prices rose 0.4% in February. As a result, over the past several months there has been a significant uptick in YoY inflation to 1.7% from 1.1% in November. Aside from the pandemic, for the past 40 years, recessions had happened when CPI less […]
January JOLTS report: during the wintertime pandemic surge, hiring hit a brick wall Yesterday morning’s JOLTS report for January was confirmatory of the weak jobs report for that month, showing a largely paused recovery. Further, for the second month in a row, hires were down sharply. Let’s examine this in accord with the data from […]
William Godwin’s ethic of leisure and the riddle of social justice In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) William Godwin declared, “the object, in the present state of society, is to multiply labour; in another state, it will be to simplify it.” In The Enquirer (1797), he affirmed, “[t]he genuine wealth of man is leisure, when it meets with […]
by Joseph Joyce Financial Globalization and Inequality The global financial crisis slowed the pace of financial globalization, while the impact of the pandemic on its future course is unclear. But enough time has elapsed to assess the record of integrated financial markets that greatly expanded in the 1990s and early 2000s. The evidence on one […]
Pandemic job losses: when should we begin a see a real improvement back towards “full employment”? Let’s take a deeper look at where employment stands as we begin to see the end of the pandemic in sight. As I and many others noted last Friday, although with the exception of one month there have been […]
Commenter R.J.S. Discuses CPI Rising led by Food, Energy, and Medical The consumer price index rose 0.4% in February, as higher prices for fuel, groceries, utilities, and medical services were only partly offset by lower prices for clothing, used vehicles, and airline fares…the Consumer Price Index Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that seasonally adjusted prices […]
Coronavirus dashboard for March 8: Update on the effect of vaccinations My first post on the coronavirus was almost exactly one year ago, on March 10, 2020, “This is what exponential growth looks like,” warning that exponential spread was exactly what had started to happen in the US. We are now finally averaging the administration of […]
Initial jobless claims make further progress towards November lows Last week I “pre-debunked” the idea that a lack of reporting in Texas skewed the big decline in claims, concluding that “being very generous, the ‘real’ seasonally adjusted number of initial claims at worst probably would have been only about 30,000 higher – I.e., 760,000 – […]
Commenter RJS, MarketWatch 666 on the Goods and Services Trade Deficit. International Trade in Goods and Services, March 5, 2021 Our trade deficit rose 1.9% in January, as both the value of our exports and our imports increased, but the value of our imports increased by more…the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods […]
Disposable People Disposable people are indispensable. Who else would fight the wars? Who would preach? Who would short derivatives? Who would go to court and argue both sides? Who would legislate? Who would sell red hots at the old ball game? For too long disposable people have been misrepresented as destitute, homeless, unemployed, or at […]