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MbS Consolidates Immediate Family Control Of Saudi Oil Industry Saudi Oil Minister al Falih, who also ran ARAMCO, has been replaced by Abdulaziz bin Salman bin Abdulaziz  al Sa’ud, half brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al Sa’ud, (MbS),who was Ambassodor to the US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 […]

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for September 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The nowcast and the long term forecast have been pretty stable, but the short term forecast has been volatile recently – and the monthly series (slightly negative) vs. the weekly data (more positive) […]

Is Doing Environmental Economics Especially Depressing? We have now learned that on Aug. 27 last week Matin Weitzman hanged himself, leaving a note citing his failure to share in last year’s Nobel Prize as well as his apparently declining mental acuity.  That prize he did not share included William Nordhaus as a recipient for his […]