Initial and continuing jobless claims: the good news continues The good news for both initial and continued claims continued this week. Initial jobless claims rose 4,000 to 353,000 from last week’s pandemic low. The 4 week average of claims declined by 11,500 to 366,500, another new pandemic low: Significant progress in the decline of initial […]
MarketWatch 666: July’s retail sales, industrial production and new home construction; June’s business inventories, Commenter and Blogger RJS The July report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that the widely watched manual count of new housing units started in July was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,534,000, which was 7.0 percent […]
Coronavirus dashboard for August 25: is the Delta wave close to peaking? I’ve been writing for about a month that, if the US outbreak followed the cycle of India and the UK, in which the Delta wave hit its peak about 6 to 8 weeks after onset, in the US the peak would be about […]
COVID Taking Center Stage, Rubio is Winning — DeSantis is Losing; “Political Interests,” The Listener Group In a recent poll of 1000 likely Florida voters, there has been a swing from previous polls 8 weeks earlier. With the new surge of Covid, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio ( R) is maintaining his lead against democratic challenger […]
Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars calls it; “SCOTUS is throwing down the gauntlet that this president’s (Biden, in case you forgot) power derives not from the law, but from the conservative majority’s feelz about what a Democratic executive should or should not be allowed to do. Just a bit of history, this was not […]
July new home sales down nearly 30% from peak, as prices perhaps start to plateau Unlike yesterday’s existing home sales, today’s report on new home sales is much more economically significant. The reason I prefer single-family housing permits as a measure is that the sales data is extremely volatile, and heavily revised over the next […]
Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XIV: Capital volume III, chapters 38 and 49 I thought this was going to be the final instalment of my review of Marx’s writing on socially necessary labour time but then I discovered, as I was going through my posts that I haven’t done the draft “chapter six” that contains the […]
Oil in longest losing streak since 2019; global oil shortage at 2,540,000 barrels per day; DUC well backlog at 7.1 months, Focus on Fracking, Commenter and Blogger, R,J.S. Thursday of last week saw the release of OPEC’s August Oil Market Report, which covers OPEC & global oil data for July, and hence it gives us a […]
As others have said in print and in the Fox broadcasts; “everything is going terrible.” Yeah kinda, there are issues. I do not believe anyone thought about the rapid collapse of Afghanistan happening. The die was cast when Trump and Pompeo bumbled their way through conversations with the Taliban. Someone was laughing afterwards. In spite […]