Coronavirus dashboard for November 12: regional variations and the winter wave There’s a glitch in 91-Divoc collecting Johns Hopkins data, so the State by State totals have not been updated for several days, but here is Our World in Data’s update for the US as a whole: As of yesterday, cases are up only 3.5% […]
Dear Democrats: Yes, inflation is a problem [Update: I see where Larry Summers has obviously read my piece below, and says, “I agree with NDD!” (Just teasing)] In the past few days, I have seen a spate of articles and tweets from prominent partisans and economists telling Democrats not to worry about inflation, either because […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for November 8 – 12 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Surprisingly, given the big increase in the CPI (that is likely to continue via “owner’s equivalent rent”), almost all the indicators across all timeframes remain positive. As usual, clicking over and reading will […]
September JOLTS report: slow progress towards a new equilibrium This morning’s JOLTS report covers September, at the beginning of which the Delta wave peaked and then gradually receded for the remainder of the month. It is also the month that the last of pandemic emergency benefits ended. We did see the second consecutive decline in […]
Seldom do we get the chance to build something the way it should be. For the internet, the first chance was back in the 1990s. Not enough was known then. We’ve learned a lot the hard way since. Let us begin our design by asking, “How best to utilize the internet?” It is apparent that […]
by New Deal democrat Why Yesterday’s CPI report was so important As promised, here is a link to my article, Why Yesterday’s CPI Report was such a Big Deal, over at Seeking Alpha. I go into a great deal of detail parsing the report, particularly with regard to how the huge increase in house prices as […]
Producer price inflation: it’s a gas! I normally do not pay much attention to producer prices, but with the huge increase in spending earlier this year and the ensuing supply bottlenecks taking center stage, the course of inflation has emerged as the most pressing economic issue. To recap briefly, with the second round of pandemic […]
MarketWatch 666: Commenter and Blogger RJS; October’s jobs report; September’s trade deficit, construction spending, and factory inventories, et al Major economic reports that were released the past week included the Employment Situation Summary for October from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and three September reports that included metrics which were either estimated or included in last week’s […]
Money Illusion in the Twenty-First Century The starting point for any consideration of inflation is that wages (and interest, profits, and rents) are prices. Every transaction has two sides, and one person’s price is another’s income. In the aggregate, leaving aside international complications, inflation can’t have either a negative or positive effect on aggregate real […]
October jobs report: a very strong report putting to rest questions about the strength of the expansion In the light of the last two month’s relatively “poor” jobs readings, an important question was what was going to happen with revisions. As we will see below, they really delivered! – big positive revisions to both of […]