by New Deal democrat An update on forecasts I have a new post up at Seeking Alpha, describing the order in which data has tended to deteriorate before consumer-led recessions. A few conditions have been met; most others have not. I have previously written that if a recession is in the works over the next few […]
Whither Ukraine? Or “wither Ukraine?” some might suggest? But no, after nearly 30 years of serious economic stagnation and massive corruption, along with losing territory to neighboring Russia with whom it has on ongoing military conflict, things are looking up there. GDP grew at 4 percent annually last quarter. The hryvnia currency has been the […]
It’s That Day again. I mostly stayed off Facebook (except for birthday greetings) and Twitter, but even LinkedIn has posts of now-yellowed newspaper articles of survivors–and probably some of those who didn’t. In another ten years, it will be as far from 11 Sep 2001 as that date was from 11 Sep 1973. At least […]
I have been looking at the data recently to find economic series that would quickly reflect the impact of rising tariffs on the consumer. One is Retail Sales: GAFO. Think of it as department store type merchandise — goods excluding autos, food and energy. It is reported every month in both the Census retail sales […]
July JOLTS report: m/m improvement, but slowing trend Yesterday*s morning’s JOLTS report for July was in general surprisingly positive on a monthly basis, but continued to show a slowing trend. To review, because this series is only 20 years old, we only have one full business cycle to compare. During the 2000s expansion: Hires peaked first, […]
Scenes from the August jobs report The August jobs report was the mirror image of most earlier reports this year: a lackluster Establishment report but a strong Household report. Let’s take a look. By now the fact that there has been a jobs slowdown is pretty well established. In the last 7 months, only 964,000 […]
MbS Consolidates Immediate Family Control Of Saudi Oil Industry Saudi Oil Minister al Falih, who also ran ARAMCO, has been replaced by Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Sa’ud, half brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Sa’ud, (MbS),who was Ambassodor to the US untile the Khahoggi murder got hot between USA […]
First I suggest you click this link and read this very interesting post on challenges to liberalism and liberal responses by Zack Beauchamp. It is an excellent essay, not super brief, but well worth reading end to end. Also stimulating enough that I began to type this comment before finishing it (I finished it after […]
There seems to be some confusion about the impact of Census employment of temporary and intermittent employment for the 2020 Census. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has a table showing the monthly employment for Special Census workers. You can find it at: BLS – Special Census Workers The table also has the data from the […]
For seven years from 2012 to 2018 the monthly payroll employment showed a solid trend of around 200,000 gains each and every month. If it was much above or below this trend, analysts found some excuse to explain the difference and expected the off-trend observation to be quickly reversed. So far this year most analysts […]