Coronavirus dashboard for April 13: watching the BA.2 “bump” The BA.2 “bump” (h/t Dr. Eric Topol) is upon us (and hopefully a “bump” is all it is). Let’s take a look at where we stand. Cases bottomed 8 days ago at 28,378. As of yesterday, they had increased to 32,835: Hospitalizations have continued to decline, […]
Jobless claims: the employment sector of the economy continues to do just fine [Note: I’ll comment on this morning’s retail sales report for March separately] Initial jobless claims rose 18,000 to 185,000 from their 50+ year last week. The 4 week average rose 2,000 from last week’s all-time low to 172,250. Continuing claims declined -48,000 […]
RJS, Focus on Fracking; Summary; Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 20-year low; US distillates exports at a 45 month high leaves domestic supplies at an 8 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 April 8th indicated that after a near record […]
Some History 2014: A frenzy of hospital mergers into ACOs as detailed by Philip Longman and Paul Hewitt could leave many families having lesser amounts of healthcare paid for by healthcare insurance due to healthcare industry consolidation leading to higher prices. We have seen this happen with higher prices for insurance plans, increased deductibles, and […]
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 […]
This comes by way of New Deal Democrat who was doing some research and ran across a not so recent Krugman article via the late Economist’s View blog. Krugman’s prescient words of things to come? Hat tip to New Deal democrat and a thank you for sending this to me. “The Great Illusion” Paul Krugman, […]
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 […]