Coronavirus dashboard for March 8: Update on the effect of vaccinations My first post on the coronavirus was almost exactly one year ago, on March 10, 2020, “This is what exponential growth looks like,” warning that exponential spread was exactly what had started to happen in the US. We are now finally averaging the administration of […]

Initial jobless claims make further progress towards November lows Last week I “pre-debunked” the idea that a lack of reporting in Texas skewed the big decline in claims, concluding that “being very generous, the ‘real’ seasonally adjusted number of initial claims at worst probably would have been only about 30,000 higher – I.e., 760,000 – […]

Commenter RJS, MarketWatch 666 on the Goods and Services Trade Deficit. International Trade in Goods and Services, March 5, 2021 Our trade deficit rose 1.9% in January, as both the value of our exports and our imports increased, but the value of our imports increased by more…the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods […]

 by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for March 2 – 6 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Two important data considerations this week: (1) for the first time, some YoY comparisons – e.g., restaurant reservations – are compared with data after the onset of the pandemic. The distortions will intensify […]

Usually, lies are told for purpose. So, in most cases, if we can determine whose purpose is being served, we will know who is behind the lie. Whose interests were being served by the Confederacy during the American Civil War? Sure as heck wasn’t those of the yeomen farmers who did most of the fighting […]

Household debt and the pandemic This is something I used to pay a lot more attention to back around the time of the Great Recession. How stretched were American households in paying their monthly bills? The Federal Reserve publishes a quarterly update tracking this issue. Two of the metrics in that quarterly update are debt […]

I saw this bit of news on Steven Colbert’s show last night. Seems Nevada’s Democratic Governor thinks tech companies need to be their own town. The thinking is that this is a way to attract business development without spending money. What could go wrong? From the AP news: “Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak announced a plan […]

Commenter R.J.S.: Record drops in US oil output, US oil exports, distillates’ output on Texas freeze as US burns 15% of natural gas inventories in one week . . US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending February 19th indicated that because the big drops in our oil exports and our oil refining associated […]

Two leading sectors of the economy – manufacturing, and housing – turn even hotter Last month I wrote that both the manufacturing and housing sectors were “on fire.” If anything, this month they turned white hot, with both construction spending and ISM manufacturing data at levels not seen in years. The overall ISM manufacturing reading […]

From WAPO: Senior Democrats are abandoning a backup plan to increase the minimum wage through a corporate tax penalty, after encountering numerous practical and political challenges in drafting their proposal over the weekend, according to two people familiar with the internal deliberations. . . . Economists and tax experts have said that the tax outlined […]