Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Threatening the Fed

We made it out of a pandemic, a potential recession, and other issues which threatened the nation with Fed Chief/Chair Jerome Powell guiding the nation’s financial stability. The Fed did implement several policies to stabilize the financial system and support the flow of credit to households, businesses, and state and local governments at the onset […]

Jobless claims: the brightest spot in the entire economy right now

 – by New Deal democrat Probably the brightest spot in the entire economy right now is initial jobless claims. Contrary to the general theme of deceleration which has been the case for several years now, initial claims appear to be breaking trend in the positive direction. Specifically, initial claims declined -7,000 last week to 221,000, their […]

Problems in our Environment

Some potential and real health issues which go unchallenged for now or are largely ignored. I read these articles and thought they may be interesting enough to be read at Angry Bear also. These are partials of longer commentaries. No so long as to give up on them halfway through them. Air and water pollution […]

June industrial production: a mild coincident positive for the economy

 – by New Deal democrat Industrial production is much less central to the US economic picture than it was before the “China shock,” since so much production moved overseas, meaning US consumers buy much more imported goods than they used to. Still it is an important if diminished coincident indicator. This morning’s report for June was […]

Producer prices, consumer prices, and tariffs

 – by New Deal democrat Much of the commentary on yesterday’s CPI report suggested that the tariff impacts were apparent. My own analysis was more cautious. That’s simply because we don’t know for sure which items were affected by tariffs, and at this point referring to, e.g., appliances that showed relatively large monthly increases in prices […]

June CPI: an apparent point of transition

 – by New Deal democrat We are at somewhat of an inflection point as to consumer inflation. On the one hand, the post-pandemic inflationary effects continue to fade. But on the other, we are waiting for the effects of Tariff-palooza!  In June the waning post-pandemic effects continued to dominate, as the only items still rising […]

Financial and commodity markets since Election Day

 – by New Deal democrat The post-jobs report data drought finally ends tomorrow. Today, let me take the opportunity to update some important trends that have been affected or caused by the T—-p Administration’s “policies.”  All graphs below showing absolute values have been normed to a value of 100 as of Election Day last November. […]

Replace Migrant Farm Workers with “High Schoolers?”

Pulled up the rest of the story on young US citizens doing the same work as migrant labor. The thought being they were young enough to do it. Teenage boys heeding the call of a federal government looking for teens to work on farms. That was 1965. I can tell you laboring for a bunch […]