Will tomorrow’s real retail sales report forecast a recession, or just a continued slowdown? No economic data today (May 16) of significance; but tomorrow one of my favorite economic indicators, retail sales, will be reported for April. Since real retail sales lead employment and generally are a short leading indicator for the economy as a […]
RJS: Focus on Fracking Summary: Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 21 year low, distillates supplies at a 17 year low; 300,000 bpd global oil surplus in April, despite loss of 1.2 million bpd from Russia & Kazakhstan; natural gas rigs at a 32 month high.. OPEC’s Report on Global Oil for April Thursday of […]
RJS, MarketWatch 666 Summary: Producer Prices Rose 0.5% in April; Record Annual Increase of 16.3% for Final Demand for Goods The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 0.5% in April, as average prices for finished wholesale goods rose by 1.3% while final demand for services was unchanged . . . that increase followed […]
Harvest season has sprung upon us in a hurry. We had to spend a few evenings in the fields collecting squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and even dug up all of the potatoes, among the multitude of other things we planted this spring and continue to plant. It’s been a busy few weeks that have been hard […]
RJS, Focus on Fracking Summary: Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 21-year low, distillates supply at a 17-year low The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending May 6th indicated that after another drop in our oil exports, another oil withdrawal […]
Coronavirus dashboard for May 13: the virus will gradually become less lethal – because you can only die once, COVID-19 is still a pandemic and will gradually transition to an endemic. A year ago I thought that between nearly universal vaccinations and an increasing percentage of the population already infected, the virus would wane into […]
by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 9 – 13 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. One measure of how the Russia-Ukraine war has been “normalized” globally, is that industrial commodity prices have declined sharply – on the order of 25% – in the past two weeks, taking back […]
I haven’t commented on rumors about Putin’s health. Lots of people have reasons to spread disinformation, and I have no way of seeing through the smoke. Still, the rumors are out there. What should we make of this?
The Malthusianism Of Benjamin Franklin And The Abortion Issue, Econospeak, Barkley Rosser Thomas Robert Malthus may well have been the least favorite economist of Karl Marx. Basically, Marx did not like him because he saw Malthus as blaming poverty on the poor themselves, their inevitable sinfulness that led them to constantly reproduce themselves excessively when […]