Nobody is (still) getting laid off [Note: This Nov. 10th consumer inflation report was very important, and not in a good way. So I plan on doing a more extensive post on it tomorrow, and I’ll probably put off the next “Coronavirus Dashboard” by Friday.] Initial claims declined another 4,000 this week to 267,000, and […]
Producer price inflation: it’s a gas! I normally do not pay much attention to producer prices, but with the huge increase in spending earlier this year and the ensuing supply bottlenecks taking center stage, the course of inflation has emerged as the most pressing economic issue. To recap briefly, with the second round of pandemic […]
‘Brutus,’ the anti-Federalist to presciently foresaw the Imperial Supreme Court As you may recall, for the past several years I have done a great deal of historical reading about Republics; how they were structured, what were their strengths and weaknesses, whether they were able to last a long time, and whether they were consistent […]
Others are calling October at 8.6% equal to September’s record, but adding additional decimal points shows October +8.6265% clearly higher than September’s +8.5931% “Record 8.6% Annual Increase in October Producer Price Index; Record 14.2% Increase for Final Demand Goods, and a 46 year Record for Prices of Intermediate Goods,” RJS, MarketWatch 666 The seasonally adjusted Producer Price Index (PPI) for final […]
Infrastructure week: organs of the human brain, created by the human hand Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it […]
Farmer and Economist Michael Smith In this AgDaily piece, they do a great job of outlining the history of agriculture and sort of where it is headed, pretty much the same as it always has been, with a few caveats. Over time it has gotten much harder and now even more so with equipment prices […]
Sesame Street’s Big Bird Gets a Covid Vaccination After Sesame Street’s Big Bird tweeted that he received the COVID-19 vaccine, Sen. Ted Cruz and other right-wing media figures criticized the character for promoting “propaganda” to children. Sesame Street launched a promotional campaign during the past week after the COVID-19 vaccine was authorized for ages 5-11, […]
Anti-Racism and Democracy in Our Schools It’s generally conceded that Terry McAuliffe’s statement “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big blunder that contributed to his defeat last week. The context was a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who had used his party’s playbook on Critical […]
Focus on Fracking: gasoline supplies lowest since November 2017 despite gasoline production above prepandemic levels; Focus on Fracking, Commenter and Blogger RJS US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending October 29th indicated that after a modest increase in our oil production and only minor changes to our oil imports, our […]