May 19, 2022 – by Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com), “Letters from An American“ Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol sent a letter to Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), asking for his voluntary cooperation in their investigation. The committee members believe he has “information regarding a tour you […]
Housing permits and starts decline slightly, but housing still an economic positive over the next 12 months Housing permits and starts declined, but not by much, in April. Importantly, while typically permits, especially single family permits, lead these series, in the past year there has been a unique divergence between permits and starts due to […]
Economic Policy Institute offers an explanation that our current inflation is different from previous recessions in the US in addition to what NDd and Barkley Rosser offer : Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a […]
Industrial production continues to show excellent growth I call industrial production the King of Coincident Indicators, because it speaks volumes about where the economy is at any particular moment, and empirically is the indicator whose peaks and troughs coincide most definitively with NBER recession dates. In April the story told by industrial production continued to […]
One of the biggest design flaws in the ACA is that subsidies for low-income families buying policies on insurance exchanges were too low. Congress raised the subsidies temporarily, but now they are set to expire right before the November election. From Huffpo: Health insurance premiums for millions of Americans will spike if Congress doesn’t act in the […]
Adjudged to be AFFIRMED. Barrett, J., delivered the (her first?) opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh, JJ., joined. Gorsuch, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ., joined. Hmmm. Fill out an application for a driver’s license, make a mistake, by ticking the wrong […]
Writing in The Atlantic in May 2021, Hoeg, Prasad, and Ghandi argued that the United States should delay vaccinating children against COVID-19 until vulnerable adults are vaccinated in poorer countries around the world. A similar argument could now be made for delaying boosters, at least for people who are not at high risk. An unvaccinated […]
Real retail sales signal further expansion, but also continue to suggest slower payrolls growth ahead Nominal retail sales for the month of April were up 0.9%, and previous months were revised higher. That means that, after inflation, real retail sales for April were up 0.6%, a very positive number. Yesterday I wrote that, rather than […]
What Is The Worst Part Of The Current Inflation In the US we may have seen the peak of overall inflation, with the annualized CPI rate increasing at 8.3% in April, down from 8.5% in March, the highest rate of increase in 40 years. The issue has become the reported top concern of the US […]