On October 1, 2025, the first day of the most recent government shutdown, Donald Trump’s net disapproval was 12 points.  By the time the shutdown ended 6 weeks later, his net disapproval had risen to 16 points.  Democrats should keep this in mind as the government funding wars heat up again.  The Dems do not […]

Happy Holidays! In this final update for 2025, we’re going to take a look at how tariffs are burdening everything on and under your Christmas tree, comparing import data from the first nine months of 2024 and 2025.  The cost of decking the halls has gone up by hundreds of millions of dollars, as everything […]

  – by New Deal democrat This is going to be a sparse week for data, with the exception of tomorrow’s long-delayed Q3 GDP report, and jobless claims on Wednesday. Sadly, so much of the data is still missing or stale that the best source for up-to-date information is in the regional Fed reports, most […]

Explaining the impact of International Trade. Does International Trade Hurt the United States? Econofact In my opinion, International Trade does not hurt the United States. It does expand our economic impact. As the article points out when U.S. exports to the rest of the world are declining, U.S. imports of foreign goods tend to decline […]

What Can Democrats Do Now? J.P. McJefferson Thoughts Democrats need to move on and move on fast. What really scares me is whether Democrats, Independents, and any others who care about democracy can, over the next couple of years, preserve the concept of “Free & Fair Elections,” and pack the 2026 campaigns with credible, charismatic […]

 – by New Deal democrat My “Weekly Indicators” post is up at Seeking Alpha. Update: All of the trends that we have been seeing for the past several months appear to be becoming more entrenched. That includes the re-normalization of the yield curve on the positive side, and weak withholding tax payments and transportation metrics on […]

– by New Deal democrat The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is “the gold standard of US employment measures. It is an actual census of 95%+ of all employers, who must report new employees for purposes like unemployment and disability benefits. Because of this, it is used for the final revisions, a/k/a benchmarks, for monthly […]

 – by New Deal democrat A truncated version of the CPI was reported for November this morning. Since no data was collected for October, the monthly change in those values was not calculated, the Census Bureau apparently having elected not to publish with the cumulative two month changes since September. Nevertheless, the two month numbers are […]

Economist Paul Krugman has a new series at his site. I will post each at Angry Bear about two weeks after he posts. Hopefully, I do not want to interfere with the publicity he will generate with his posting. I think I can get away with that timing without causing issues. I subscribe to his […]

Review: Dry Sicily – The One-Handed Economist The PR people for this documentary asked me if I wanted to screen it, but they wanted to charge a fee (quite reasonable for any documentary, given non-trivial costs). When I said LUC had no funds, they came back with an “offer I couldn’t refuse”: Apparently your work […]