The consumer / employment sector of the economy continues powering along ….. aaaaand, I’m back. Did you miss me? Here is the essence of my view of the economy right now: 1. The producer sector of the economy is struggling, partly due to higher interest rates in the last two years filtering through the system, […]
An introduction to Save the Post Office and Steve Hutkins. I am not quite sure how I got to Steve; but, I do remember chatting with Mark Jamison who also wrote at Save the Post Office and posting his words up at Angry Bear (Asking the Wrong Questions: Reflections on Amazon, the Post Office, and […]
Dear Readers, Commenters, and Bears, Bill and I are looking for an additional editor: a participant in running the Angry Bear site and interact with contributors and readers to encourage responses and moderate threads as administrator add consistent points of view in posts and finding topics to supplement contributors efforts, become knowledgeable with the administration […]
Manufacturing still weak I’m still traveling this morning, but for now let me just note that this morning’s durable goods orders showed a decline again: Figure 1 Manufacturing is flat to slightly contracting. The consumer, primarily thanks to lower mortgage rates, is keeping the economy going.
The Famous Baseball-Watching Equality-Equity Graphic, Scrutinized Here’s the graphic, widely used to explain why equity outcomes require unequal treatment of different people. Benjamin Studebaker (hat tip Naked Capitalism) doesn’t like it at all: “I hate it so much.” But his complaints, about the way the graphic elides classic debates in political theory, strike me as being […]
September existing home sales: a pause in the housing rebound I normally don’t bother with existing home sales, since it is the least economically important of housing data, but it’s a really slow news week, so … September existing home sales were reported at 5.38 million annualized by the NAR. While that is a decline […]
by New Deal democrat The divergent nowcast and one model’s forecast at Seeking Alpha Over 10 years ago I found a good, quick-and-dirty way of looking at the Index of Leading Indicators. It only matters at turning points, which means, for the first time since the 2015-16 “shallow industrial recession,” it’s worth looking at now. […]
An Increasingly Divergent US Economy Lots of people have been huffing and puffing about whether or not the US economy will go into a recession in the near future, with Menzie Chinn and Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser saying it is now about 50-50 whether or not the US economy will go into recession by the […]
Positive housing, initial claims, and Philly Fed outweigh negative industrial production So, after a nearly empty week until now, there were four economic reports this morning. Three of them were good. First, although overall housing starts and permits declined, single family permits, the most forward looking and least volatile of the metrics, were only 3000 […]
A Nobel for the Randomistas I don’t think anyone was surprised by this year’s “Nobel” prize in economics, which went to three American-based specialists in the design of on-the-ground experiments in low income countries, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. I think the award has merit, but it is important to keep in mind […]