Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XV: “Chapter Six” from the draft manuscripts of Capital

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time XV: “Chapter Six” from the draft manuscripts of Capital The draft “Chapter Six” was preceded by an earlier version of the analysis of formal and real subsumption of labour under capital. That earlier version is 28 pages long in volume 34 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works. “Chapter Six,” proper, is 111 pages […]

How Redistribution Makes America Richer

By Steve Roth ( Steve Roth is a contributor to Angry Bear and is currently publisher of Evonomics. Originally published at Evonomics) April 14, 2021 You hear a lot about bottom-up and middle-out economics these days, as antidotes to a half-century of “trickle-down” theorizing and rhetoric. You’re even hearing it, prominently, from Joe Biden. They’re compelling […]

Initial and continuing jobless claims: the good news continues

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 […]

July’s retail sales, industrial production and new home construction

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?

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 […]

Changing Dynamics in Florida, Current Covid Deaths Exceed Previous Deaths

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 […]

The Federal Courts Engaging in Foreign Affairs

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

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

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 […]