June data starts out mixed: manufacturing strong, housing stalls, New Deal democrat June data started out this morning with the ISM manufacturing report. There was no big change from last month’s torrid pace. The overall index declined a very slight -0.6% to 60.6, while the leading new orders component declined by 1 to 66:Any number […]
June jobs report: a tale of two very different surveys – but both far from full recovery HEADLINES: 850,000 jobs added. Of these, 662,000 were private sector jobs, and 188,000 were government jobs, chiefly in education. The alternate, and more volatile measure in the household report indicated a gain of only 128,000 jobs, which factors […]
Farmer-economist Michael Smith comments from More Random News Events of the Week post ________ My comment on the open thread, “what exactly does the federal government plan to do this is a little mind boggling. The USDA is limited in the resources they have. They can provide grants but it would need congress to fund […]
New jobless claims: a surprise to the positive side I have been paying particular attention to new jobless claims this year, as being the most important weekly economic datapoint to correlate with vaccination progress. My ultimate target for claims is an average of 325,000 or below, which would signify a return to normal expansion levels in […]
CMS bans Surprise Billing The issues here were medical services practitioners not being on hospital staff. Practitioners not subject to hospital billing practices and bargaining contracts with Healthcare insurance were billing at their rates to recover what they deem to be reasonable. In the end, the patient pays whatever can be worked out. Radiology and […]
Black and Brown Americans suffer the most in biggest U.S. drop in life expectancy since WWII, Modern Healthcare, June 2021 In an earlier post listing a series of articles I thought might be interesting to AB, this one Modern Healthcare article was listed as one of interest. I decided to expand on the article and […]
House prices continue to surge, with affordability near its worst since the Great Recession The FHFA and Case Shiller house price indexes for May and April, respectively, were released this morning. Because housing affordability is very much an issue, let’s take a look. YoY the FHFA index is up 15.7%, and the Case Shiller […]
Coronavirus dashboard for June 28: comparisons with one year ago as “delta” spreads Let’s begin this installment with a look at vaccinations by county from a different source that a reader pointed me to last week, COVIDactnow: The urban/rural and Red State/Blue State divides are pretty obvious. Conor Kelly (whose work I was highlighting one year ago) also […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for June 21- 25 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. All of the important metrics for the economy remain positive. But, in addition to supply chain issues, we have to start worrying about COVID again, because the delta variant has now taken hold in […]
New jobless claims stall, adding to the evidence that stalling vaccinations and case counts are having an economic effect New jobless claims have been the most important weekly economic datapoint this year, as they have correlated strongly with vaccination progress. Unfortunately, that progress has largely stalled in the past month, and now new jobless claims […]