Commentary taken from; USA Facts. Data is from “Table 7. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers. “What are the biggest drivers of inflation in the past year?” USAFacts Answering the question proposed by the title? Housing was the main driver of inflation from March 2025 to March 2026. There is some of my editing […]
“Updating the long leading indicators: corporate profits, and housing.” – by New Deal democrat This week I’m spending some time updating the non-financial long leading indicators. As I wrote on Monday, I haven’t updated these in a while in large part because the chaos coming out of Washington has blindsided much of the economic data. There’s […]
New polling from Strength in Numbers shows the public supports impeachment, 55% in favor to 37% opposed. This supports the prediction from the betting market Kalshi that currently gives Trump a 68% chance of impeachment before the end of his term. (Note that removal by the Senate is much less likely than impeachment by the […]
Louisiana Court proposed Homeless Program, “Streets to Success Act“ AB: I do not believe this is a “failure to communicate” law as much as a failure to provide a place for people to go, sleep, and make a living. What do you do at that point? The state and county put you to work in […]
– by New Deal democrat Consumer spending is about 70% of the economy, and retail sales is our first wide measure of that spending. This morning’s update for March (still after all these months delayed about a week compared with the schedule before last autumn’s government shutdown) was unsurprisingly dominated by what happened at gas stations. […]
A year later, here’s where things stand on Trump’s manufacturing revival . . . What happened when Trump put a stack of tariffs into play? Not much good is happening for Labor, In the first place the amount of Labor in manufacturing has been declining for years due to manual machining going to multi-functional NC […]
Mortgage Payments and the Vibecession: Homeowners’ “Cost of Living” Mortgage payments are most owner-occupiers’ biggest monthly cash outlay. And they’re way up. Steve Roth — Wealth Economics I came across a pretty eye-popping economic fact recently: The typical payment on a new mortgage for an average American residence has ~doubled since 2019.1 It was $913 in Dec. 2019; […]
– by New Deal democrat So much of the changes to the economy has been dictated by the whims of the White House that it has not made much sense to throughly update the suite of long leading indicators in many months. After all, why chart their incipient effects when they are consistently being overtaken by […]
I went to high school with Charlie Ergen (see pic). He was two years older, so he was a senior when I was a sophomore. He was on the basketball team and student council as well as being senior class president, so we didn’t share any classes or extracurricular activities. He graduated with a BA […]
Unemployment has increased for U.S.-born workers in the face of mass deportations: Trump’s draconian immigration enforcement is harming all workers. Economic Policy Institute, April 3, 2026 During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance promised that mass deportations and a crack-down on immigration would open up jobs for unemployed U.S. citizens. The theory was […]