March consumer inflation part 2: I told you so; the Fed *must* start paying attention to house price indexes This is the second part of my take on the March consumer inflation report. As you may have already read, total inflation clocked in at +1.2% for March alone! YoY consumer prices are up 8.6%, the […]
Tough Guy, senator Mitch McConnell making political hay over President Joe Biden extending a student loan moratorium for a few more months. The mistake Joe is making or has made is not deciding what to do. It is getting late in the game of politics. If your mind is tired of all these politics, you […]
March consumer inflation part 1: real wages decline sharply The March consumer inflation report was particularly important, and particularly bad. So much so that I am going to divide my comments into two separate posts. First, the news on real wages was terrible. While nominally nonsupervisory wages rose 0.4% in March, since inflation rose 1.2%, […]
Housing affordability update: prices vs. mortgage payments; and ramifications for the economy No economic news today (Monday 4/11), and most States didn’t report new COVID cases over the weekend, so let’s take a look at something else; namely, housing affordability, which I’ve been meaning to update for several weeks. The first graph below compares 4 measures […]
Asymmetric Whining This is not news, but yet again we see the old phenomenon of people whining a lot when something gets worse but then saying nothing when it gets better. The latest example of that involves gasoline prices. They were rising and got into the range of near-real highs seen in times like 2008, […]
In the Paul Krugman vs. Nate Silver cage match, I’m on Team Nate Prof. Paul Krugman and Nate Silver got into a dust-up earlier this week about why so many voters seem to have soured on the Democrats. So that you don’t have to go digging through all the Twitter detritus, Alternet has a good write-up copying all […]
I am interested in inflation expectations (acting like a macroeconomist for a change). In particular I am thinking about something Brad DeLong just tweeted. He says his subjective probability of sustained inflation due to expected inflation causing current inflation is still just 40% Why “.only a 40% chance …? Because bond markets expect the Fed […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 4 – 8 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. After several weeks of tightening and then inversion, the yield curve in the US Treasury market un-inverted in a big way this past week – via higher long term rates which drove mortgage […]
Benchmark revisions, oh my! Four week average of jobless claims makes all-time 55 year series low The DoL made revisions to the last five years of jobless claims, in particular revising the seasonal adjustments, and the differences are eye-popping. Last week initial claims (blue) were reported at 202,000. With the revisions, they are now 171,000! […]
Just a collection of articles which come to my email box from various sources. Many of them I read and just let go by. Posted snippets of them to attract interest. Some I write about such as Student Loans, Healthcare, etc. “Mask-Wearing Will Continue in Some Situations: Polls,” MedScape Even as the COVID-19 threat seems […]